My cautiously optimistic map
I think Biden will win, but I'm not getting too overconfident this time.
In 2016, I was feeling so cocky about Hillary Clinton’s chances - especially after the “Access Hollywood” incident - that I openly mused about her winning all 50 states. Seriously. I backed off from that closer to Election Day, but I still thought she had it in the bag.
So, yeah, I’m being way more cautious in 2020, despite polls showing Biden headed for a resounding win. (Contrary to popular belief, the 2016 polls really weren’t that far off - except in Wisconsin, where Trump’s narrow win really did come out of nowhere.)
Behold my obligatory 270 to win map:
Biden will make it agonizingly close in Texas and Georgia - in the latter, he may help pull at least one Democratic Senate candidate over the finish line - but I just don’t see him winning either state outright. (Although these early voting numbers from Texas sure make you wonder.) And in the land of Florida Man, I think Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, scarred by their experiences with socialism, will give Trump another agonizingly close win.
The good news for Biden is, he doesn’t need these states to win the Presidency. It’s the Rust Belt states, which Trump won in 2016 by the slightest of margins, that should get him the electoral votes he needs.
And, yes, I have Ohio and Iowa listed as “lean Democratic” on my map. The one gutsy prediction I’m willing to make this year is that they follow the other states in that part of the country in backing Biden.
How soon will we know the winner? Once we know if Biden won Florida, there’s your answer. If Trump hangs on in the Sunshine State, we’ll need some more time. After a chaotic and stressful 2020, I’m not sure I can handle another week or two of uncertainty.
If you don’t like Trump but feel like you “have” to vote for him to fight back against the extreme left, I recommend you check out this piece from Areo: Why 14 Critics of “Social Justice” Think You Shouldn’t Vote Trump.
Most of these short pieces make one or both of these points: Donald Trump threatens freedom of expression and other classical liberal values at least as much as the woke left, and his very presence in the White House is making the left even more radical.
Steven Pinker puts forward the question every reluctant Trump voter should be asking themselves:
…if you think supporting Trump is in practice a tactical corrective to encroachments of the illiberal hard left, answer this question: have the encroachments gotten better or worse during the Trump years?
Anne Applebaum, in The Atlantic, makes a similar point:
…Yes, it is true: We do live in a moment of rising political hysteria. Far-left groups do knock down statues, not just of Confederate leaders but of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Some self-styled “antifa” activists do seem more interested in smashing shop windows than in peaceful protest. Dangerous intellectual fashions are sweeping through some American universities—the humanities departments of the elite ones in particular. Some radical students and professors do try to restrict what others can teach, think, and say. Left-wing Twitter mobs do attack people who have deviated from their party line, trying not just to silence them but to get them fired. A few months ago, I signed a group letter deploring the growing censoriousness in our culture: “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” A part of the left—admittedly the part most addicted to social media—reacted to this letter with what can only be described as censoriousness, intolerance, and a determination to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
But anyone who is truly worried by these tendencies should fear the consequences of a second Trump administration even more. Anyone who actually cares about academic freedom, or the future of objective reporting, or the ideas behind the statues built to honor American democrats in the country’s public squares, must hope that Trump loses. If he wins a second term, extremism on the left will not be stopped. It will not grow quieter. Instead, extremism will spread, mutate into new forms, and gradually become entrenched in more areas of American life.
Radicalism of all kinds will spread, on the right as well as the left, because America will find itself deeply enmeshed in the same kind of death spiral that the country experienced in the 1850s, a form of negative politics that the British political scientist Roger Eatwell has called “cumulative extremism.” Eatwell described this phenomenon in an article about northern England in 2001, a moment when groups of radicalized white British men physically clashed with groups of radicalized British Muslims. At that time, there were deep economic, religious, and sociological sources for the violence. People in the far right felt themselves to be outside of politics, alienated from the Labour Party that most had once supported. The neighborhoods where both groups lived were poor and getting poorer.
But the mutual anger also acquired its own logic and its own momentum. The perception of anti-Muslim prejudice pushed some Muslims toward radical preachers. The radical preachers provoked an anti-Muslim backlash. Extreme language on one side led to extreme language on the other. Organized violence on one side led to organized violence on the other. Both would blame the other for accelerating the dynamic, but in fact the process of radicalization was mutually reinforcing. Milder, more moderate members of both communities began to choose sides. Being a bystander got harder; remaining neutral became impossible. Nor was this remotely unusual. “People tend to become violent, or to sympathize with violence, if they feel an existential threat,” Eatwell told me recently. They also become more extreme, he said, when they feel their political opponents are not just wrong, but evil—“almost the devil.”
America desperately needs someone who can bring down the temperature a bit. And, thankfully, the Democrats nominated the candidate best disposed to do just that. Can you imagine how insane this campaign would have been if it were Trump vs. Bernie or Trump vs. Warren?
While Justin Trudeau gives the predictable “decapitating people is bad but…” answer about whether freedom of expression includes the right to caricature one religious figure in particular, Aris Roussinos in UnHerd gets at the heart of the issue: who gets to decide what the rest of us are allowed to say.
To frame the events in France as an abstract debate over free speech is thus to avoid the central issue: it is a question of sovereignty. The essential problem Macron is grappling with is not the content of what can or cannot be said in France, but who gets to decide. The question, now, is whether the French state holds the monopoly of force, or whether any young radical can pick up a knife and declare his beliefs sovereign over the laws of France, and the lives of his countrymen.
For five years, the French army has been deployed on the country’s streets to protect its own people from their fellow citizens, and over the past two weeks it has become clear that this is not enough. There is no room for compromise in this scenario, a state of exception outside the ordinary bounds of politics: Either the state is sovereign, or it is not. The dividing lines, too, have now been drawn up clearly: between friend and enemy, citizen and terrorist.
Those who would challenge the state’s authority by murdering their fellow citizens cannot appeal to their own wounded feelings as just cause; those providing cover for them, like the American journalists churning out equivocating editorials on their behalf, are not liberal humanitarians but enablers of terrorism, however much they invoke the self-pitying language of identity politics.
There is, simply, no means of coexistence with those who wish to destroy you. …
I wish I had more confidence that France will win.
The same Boomers complaining about “W.A.P.” being a bad influence on our children put a bouncy folk-rock song about cannibalism in the top twenty in 1971.
So far, your map seems to be mostly right apart from Ohio and Pennsylvania...
Trump vs. Bernie seems like a recipe for civil war. (My nuclear physicist ex in the US is a Bernie supporter...with the same lack of reason and practicality I see in Sanders....so I sometimes get an earful directly from the source, so to speak.) Sanders would have rallied his supporters with a fervour not entirely unlike that of the Trump crowd, just on the opposite end of the spectrum (although the idea of a horseshoe seems quite appropriate here). Biden really does seem like the best person to restore a sense of sanity. It’s one thing to be emotional about issues. It’s quite another matter to let emotions run the show where reason should prevail. That’s true in all aspects of life, both political and personal. Feelings make us human, but need to be backed by logic and factual progress to know that we’re on track to what we want to achieve.
The situation in France is increasingly concerning. France needs to clarify who makes the rules, and soon.
It certainly seems that Americans are throwing themselves into this election. Hopefully it will be enough.