Blog
American Bounty
This week Americans travel home for Thanksgiving. In spite of inclement weather forecasts, a record eighty million people will be on the move. Families will reconnect, turkey will be eaten, football will be watched. Traditionally we thank God for the extraordinary bounty of this country.
But many of us are right now feeling the ache of an election that divided us existentially. Nearly half of those who voted believe that the country is in danger: the stated determination of Donald Trump, the great disrupter, to throw into disarray institutions that have safeguarded this two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in democracy is a heartache. We are grieving. Those who voted for him did not necessarily like him – though some did. But a common thread among his supporters was a sense of desperation with things as they are.
We hope this Thanksgiving time will help us affirm all that we love and to deepen our connections with things and people that matter to us.
Why did the Democrats lose? Kamala Harris has largely been credited for running an excellent campaign, and her debate performance against Donald Trump on September 10 was remarkably good. Her weaknesses were that she did not address the immigration crisis and the economy adequately. She ran on democracy and abortion, and those proved not to be enough.
She was hampered by the process by which she became the nominee. By announcing before he chose her as his vice-presidential candidate in 2020 that he intended to choose a woman, Joe Biden made it hard for her to shake off an aura of his “diversity” choice. This tainted her in the eyes of the right, who have made what they call “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) the butt of their disparagement. Mr. Biden’s failure to bow out of the race a year earlier denied us Democratic primaries where candidates would have been tested. Then there is the fact that it has been extremely rare for a vice-president to follow their sitting president into office. George H.W. Bush did it in the 1988 election. The president who did it before Bush was Martin Van Buren in 1836. This is because it is so difficult to defend the record of your predecessor while trying to assert your distinctive potential. All this in addition to Harris having to overcome standard prejudices about a black female candidate.
Harris was also seriously hampered by the Democratic Party’s more longstanding confusion over its essence and role. The Democratic Party has come to represent the meritocracy of the elite, and in the process, the party has lost its attunement with working people and its traditional primary focus on the disadvantaged. Instead, its emphasis on cultural identity as an approach to empowerment has taken that to extremes, as seen with transgender issues that do not resonate with large numbers and make the party seem out of touch. In a country that has shifted to the right since 1980, Democrats have seen their passion for economic equality trashed as “Marxism” by the other party. The trick is to find a left-of-center position that resonates with a country whose composite national outlook falls to the right-of-center.
Of course, a party that feels no inhibitions about lying or about indulging in crowd-pleasing denigration is, unfortunately, going to have an advantage. Trump created and played on fear. He trumped up beliefs that the illegal immigrants of this country are taking jobs away from others who want them and making people unsafe, even though crime rates of immigrants are generally low. His reported intention to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes will draw down on numbers working in agriculture and contribute to rising food prices.
But the key point about the Trump victory is that Trump was able to appeal to a very large and disaffected group who believe they have been left out when it comes to sharing in the purpose, culture and bounty of this country.
People were incensed about inflation, but the problem was greater than that. In the years since 1981, the gap between the rich and poor in America has brutally widened. Wages have remained stagnant, while tax deductions for the wealthy have increased exponentially. In 2021, America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Trade unions have all but disappeared. Ronald Reagan’s administration removed regulation of guardrails on companies and limitations on stock buybacks. NAFTA (passed in the Clinton administration) encouraged sending basic industries overseas, leaving whole towns in the midwest with no livelihood. It was also on Bill Clinton’s watch that welfare ceased to be an open-ended entitlement from the federal government. Instead, money is now given as block grants to states, which distribute it according to their own formulas, often including a requirement that a person be working in order to get welfare. The new system introduced caps on length of time aid could be given and fines for those who did not comply with aspects of the regulations.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, brought to America’s attention a few days ago that General Motors just last week laid off 1,000 workers, having laid off 1,500 workers last summer. The company mumbled that their bottom line could not meet the costs of paying these workers, but Reich reports that GM’s profits for this year will surpass its 2022 record profit of $14.5 billion. GM CEO Mary Barra’s compensation for 2024 is slated to be $27.8 million, making the ratio of her compensation to that of the average worker 303:1.
Historians tell us that revolutions happen not when things reach their worst but when things start getting better. At that point expectations rise, and then when things don’t continue to improve, people protest. The pandemic, interestingly, has ended up helping many in the workforce who benefitted from the hiatus during which they had federal assistance and were freed up to look for better paying jobs. Large numbers have moved from the service industry (restaurants, hotels, et cetera) into tech, which grew enormously during the pandemic. This raised expectations and gave people more sense of power, enhancing their hopes for more.
But the lives of those at the very bottom of the economic ladder may well have been permanently disrupted by the pandemic. COVID-19 mortality rates affected the economically disadvantaged disproportionately. Millions of Americans in the lower socio-economic tier are still suffering that psychological shock, as well as experiencing a disruption of the fragile economic balance of their lives. Government handouts during the pandemic reduced the poverty rate on the short term. Trump instituted those handouts, but it was left to Biden to end them once COVID-19 had receded. He had to do it, but he did it just as inflation was hotting up.
All of the above provides some background to the anger and the welcoming of disruptive populist politics we saw during the presidential election on November 5.
Will Donald Trump be able to meet the expectations of those who elected him? Right now, we don’t yet know which of his policy promises will come to fruition in his administration. Cabinet nominations indicate that in most cases loyalty to himself is a more important criterion than experience with the substance of the position. Six of his nominees had a role in preparing the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, a policy blueprint for the new administration that reorganizes the federal bureaucracy to further a conservative agenda, greatly enhancing the powers of the presidency. It encourages Mr. Trump in his plan to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants in the federal government and designate their jobs as political appointments, thus allowing him to fill the bureaucracy with more loyal followers. Mr. Trump promises to place tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China on day one – an action that will result in further inflation. He also promises to lower corporate taxes from 21 percent to 15 percent, further enriching the wealthy.
Mr. Trump’s promise to improve the economic lives of working people seems unlikely to be achieved with such policies.
Privileged Americans have always been able to be complacent about the bounty and possibilities of this country. But in a country whose ethos of self-help seems bottomless, the disinclination to use government to redistribute resources has been a no-no written into the culture. This is a country founded, in the minds of many people, on an idea that freedom consists of minimal government action. Inroads into this mindset were made during the period bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Subsequently the pushback has been enormous, making Barack Obama’s success in passing a broader health insurance system that still left over twenty million uninsured a near miracle. What this election has made clear is that working people see through intellectualized notions of empowerment. They respond to words that resonate with their experience.
As we approach this Thanksgiving Day, we are thankful that our recent election occurred without violence. We recognize anew that our precious democracy requires participation and vigilance from all of us and we prepare ourselves to discover new ways to do that. And we ask ourselves, at a time when the frustrations of our workforce have been brought before us afresh, can we imagine a country that can redefine itself from being a self-help, me-first collective that denies its obligations to those left behind, to a country determined to allow everyone to thrive?
Thank you, Kamala Harris
Thirty-six hours to go…
And so, in the end, is it really about her being a woman?
Many particular factors have made this presidential election cycle exceptional: for starters, the inability of both parties to bring in new blood, making the two original candidates the oldest and second-oldest presidential candidates in American history; Trump’s legal convictions for sexual predation and graft; the extraordinary cult following of Trump that regards the legal convictions as irrelevant; the shear brashness of Trump in running a campaign of falsehood and crudeness, demeaning the office he seeks by shedding all appropriate decorum; the accompanying breakdown of the traditional Republican Party; the magnitude of economic challenges faced in the post-pandemic world that make the public deeply dissatisfied; the visceral sense of doom we feel about climate change; wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon; above all, democratic values under attack not only in the US but round the globe. And then there was Joe Biden’s belated departure from the race.
While carrying all of this in my soul, the most outstanding moment of the election cycle, for me, was when Kamala Harris stepped forward firmly and showed she was ready.
Some, perhaps many, of us at one time or another have found ourselves in a situation where we had the chance to rise to being someone larger than we had ever been before. The decision to step towards that call is an act of will, tempered by knowing that we will have to grow to meet the challenge.
Kamala Harris’s situation on July 21 was of this order. It is a sobering honor to be the container holding an historic moment for everyone.
She knew without a doubt she was the person of the hour. The demands of the situation, rather than her being a woman or a person of color, were what called, and she has continued to present herself as the person best qualified to do the job she seeks.
Biden’s slowness to get to grips with his decline shortchanged her. She would have benefitted from primaries where she could have honed her message, and from a longer campaign where the public could become more familiar with her.
But Harris is not a person to linger with frustrations. She assesses her options and moves forward without drama. And when he finally decided, she was ready to go.
Abortion’s polarizing power
Even though Harris is not campaigning on gender, many are saying this is a presidential season defined by gender. One candidate is a proud and open sexual predator, convicted of sexual abuse and defamation against journalist E. Jean Carroll, and of falsely categorizing his hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels as a campaign reimbursement.
Curiously, the same candidate, though originally a supporter of women’s right to choose, took up the anti-abortion torch when he recognized it would earn him the support of pro-life Christians in the Republican party. His appointment of three pro-life Supreme Court judges made possible the Supreme Court’s removal of a constitutional right to abortion through the Dobbs’ decision of 2022. Abortion policy has become the prerogative of state legislatures, twenty-two of which have since passed measures limiting abortion. In some cases, the new laws are so stringent that doctors are intimidated from performing related medical procedures that are essential to women’s health. Thus the “abortion issue” has turned into a “women’s health” issue.
As a nation and a people, we differ in our views about abortion. For some, the sacred right to life starting at conception transcends every other consideration in this matter, and that view deserves respect. But you can adhere to a personal moral and spiritual code that does not accept abortion and still recognize that a government ban is not a suitable solution. Not least it invites other seriously negative health outcomes for women and denies them the dignity of being able to make their own decisions about their body. This is Harris’s position.
Will the many women who feel strongly on this issue propel Kamala Harris to victory? According to Newsweek, the rise in numbers leaning towards the Democratic position on abortion has been largely thanks to women’s shifting views—up from 51 percent just before Harris entered the race in July 2024 to 55 percent in October. These figures are up from 48 percent in July 2023.
But a majority of men support abortion also. As of October 2024, 52 percent say they support the Democratic Party’s position. This is so even though the numbers of men supporting the Republican party’s position has risen from 33 percent to 40 percent in the past year.
As a result, Donald Trump is now tempering his message on abortion. He has refuted the notion, repeated by Kamala Harris in their debate on September 10, that he would pass a federal abortion ban. He takes credit for overturning Roe v. Wade but now makes confusing assertions along the lines that states should decide the matter.
Abortion is one of the polarizing issues – if not the single most polarizing issue – of our time. Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, underlines how each new assertion on this subject from one side draws an escalating assertion from the other. "Those who align with the Democratic view, often advocating for broader access to abortion, appear to feel a stronger need to assert their stance as states enact more restrictive measures.” For this reason, says Panagopoulos, the issue of abortion is “becoming not just one of policy preference but one of identity for many voters."
The voting gap between men and women
But there are a number of other factors that put gender at the heart of this presidential campaign season, not least a sharpening of men and women’s differing views in general. Among all registered voters, 51 percent of women tilt to the Democratic party, and 44 percent to the Republican party. Young women say they’ll vote for Harris over Trump by a 33-point margin. Eighty-one percent of Black women support Harris. Women have been registering and turning out to vote in greater numbers than men in every election since 1980. And in this election cycle, women have been turning out for early voting in greater numbers than men.
Notable within these statistics is the fact that white women, when considered as a separate category, tilt to Donald Trump. Trump won the white women’s vote in 2016 and 2020. Now a key question for Harris is whether she can bring them across to her side of the line.
The Quinnipiac polls conducted throughout October show that in five of the seven key swing states, Harris had a significant lead among women (between 51 percent and 61 percent of likely female voters would vote for her), while Trump had a comparable advantage among men in the same states.
The gap between men and women creates an overall 21 percentage point divide, according to the Washington Post’s average of October national polls, where Harris leads by an average of 11 points among women while Trump leads by 10 points among men. This is roughly similar to the 2020 and 2016 national exit polls.
Another significant voting gap is the one between college educated and high school educated voters, which is 29 percentage points, with Trump ahead 10 points among people without a college degree and Harris ahead 19 points among those with one.
And the gap between men with only a high school education and women with a college education is 43 percent, reflecting two entirely different life experiences and mindsets. This highly significant statistic helps capture the nature of the deep social chasm in the US today.
Donald Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency contributed to a rise of women’s involvement in politics, as seen through demonstrations like the Women’s March of 2017 and more women running for elected office. Moreover, even though the #MeToo movement pre-existed the political rise of Donald Trump, it went viral following his victory, putting the spotlight on sexual misconduct as never before.
Same sex marriage
Another aspect of the gender issue at play in this election is that same-sex marriage could be challenged by the current Supreme Court if we have a Trump victory. Justice Clarence Thomas made this clear by issuing a concurring opinion at the time of the Dobbs decision in 2022 proposing that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
In 2015, the Supreme Court found in Obergefell v. Hodges that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional. But 30 states still have laws on their books that prohibit marriage equality, so that if Obergefell v. Hodges were to be overturned, these state bans would come back into effect. To offset this possibility, three states – California, Colorado and Hawaii – will, on November 5, ask voters to vote on propositions affirming the right to gay marriage.
Are women finding greater self-confidence as a result of Harris’s candidacy?
Abortion, gay marriage, and sexual predation are topics we know well and they have been under discussion for some time, but gender took a further ironic turn last week when an ad was released where actress Julia Roberts tells voters — women specifically — that votes are secret and therefore, if you and your spouse disagree, you can vote for your chosen candidate and your spouse will never know.
The right-wing media were quick to criticize this appeal to marital deception. The purpose of the ad, of course, is to remind women once again that they have agency. As a result, one in eight women and one in ten men have revealed that they have at some time voted differently from their spouses and not told.
All of us women who have made the transition from a limited notion of our possibilities to putting ourselves out there in the high-stakes game of professional life, watch Harris with personalized interest. I sit in front of the TV and quietly tell her not to wave her hands so much, to lower the register of her voice, to smile less, to be more serious. We women have worked on these very things to ensure that we will be taken seriously. Even if I worry for her, seeing her blow those cautionary suggestions to the winds and be content to be herself is a delightful bursting of the bubble. I am taken by surprise…. Oh, maybe we can be ourselves after all. Maybe we actually don’t have to expunge from our self-presentation those things that men tend to ridicule.
“We don’t know who she is,” is a frequent complaint about Kamala Harris. Given the amount of time she has spent in large public gatherings with vast TV coverage, as well as social media’s efficient spreading of the word, it would be reasonable to ask why so many people say this. Is it because they are expecting something that they are not seeing? What is it they are looking for that, if she were a white man, they would not be looking for? Is “We don’t know who she is” really a statement of unease because they are looking at a black woman claiming the right to lead the most powerful country and they don’t know how that is supposed to look?
Of course this is the least of it for Harris. Her opponent makes a practice of demeaning anyone who disagrees with him. In the case of Harris, as well as other women, he feels entitled to use epithets like “weak” and “dumb as a rock.” There are “Trump or the Tramp” T-shirts. And the whole thing about her laughter. She introduced the idea we could laugh at Trump, pronounced him “unserious.” She proposed joy as an antidote to a national politics rife with ugliness and crudity. She brought a breath of fresh air. She got in return pejoratives suggesting her joy is the handiwork of an airhead. Nothing she does goes undisparaged by Trump.
In spite of the fact that Kamala Harris has been remarkably able in presenting herself as a post-DEI candidate, make no mistake, she has a thirty-five year career behind her in which, at every step, she was forced to overcome the tensions that her race and gender presented. As the daughter of highly accomplished immigrant parents – an Indian woman and a Jamaican man – she has succeeded again and again.
Harris is not ideological. She is pragmatic to her fingertips. She takes problems on their merits. She instructs her speech writers to cut away the fluff and sentimentality. She gets down to business. As a person of color as well as a woman, she knows that she has to be better than everyone else in order to be given a voice. In the fifteen weeks since her candidacy was declared we have come to know her as a person with trustworthy instincts who cares about the American people and wants to be a unifier.
She stepped forward assertively when the moment came, and has run a superb campaign, allowing the Democratic party to be a genuine player in this election cycle. Thank you, Kamala Harris.
Bobos Busted
Twelve days to go….
On a flight back to the US from Europe several weeks ago, the man sitting beside me struck up a conversation when he noticed I was reading an article on conservativism in the US. He made it clear he considered himself a conservative, and traditionally a Republican, but right now, he said, “I don’t have a party.” This Republican dilemma is acute right now, yet this is a dilemma Democrats find hard to understand: Why would you feel you faced a dilemma when Donald Trump is on the ballot?
But let’s look at this. The margin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has hardly shifted in recent weeks. In a race where one candidate is a convicted felon with a record of sexual molestation and a refusal to respect the results of a fair presidential election, the close margin suggests that the United States is a country dramatically separated by other concerns. Indeed, two unshifting mindsets define us. They supply people with a strong sense of social identity and command loyalty at the level of a family or church. The decline of religion has definitely contributed to this state of affairs. So has the emergence of a liberal university-educated elite that has shifted the Left’s emphasis away from its trade union and working-class roots to focus on cultural inclusion and a morality of “choice.” While the substance of the Left’s positions does not sit well with the American right, the bigger problem, according to several commentators on the right, is that the Left is condescending and insular.
In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Bret Stevens posed the question [H]ow can we fashion a liberalism that doesn’t turn so many ordinary people off?
Back in 2001, another New York Times columnist who tilts to the right, David Brooks, coined the term Bobo - Bohemian-Bourgeois - to describe the meritocracy that has become the elite of our time. Brooks’s book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, examines the influencers of the baby-boom generation, a group who started out as university-based rebels in the 1960s, then linked elements of bohemian behavior with capitalism to create an impression that they stand outside any typical social stratification. This group was smart at school, gained college degrees, and became thought leaders through professional jobs such as college professors, journalists, physicians, civil servants, and politicians. Richard Florida’s 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, describes this elite class similarly, underlining how engineers, mangers, researchers, as well as artists, have used their creativity to redesign the workplace. Now they are the arbiters of which enterprises succeed or fail, and, as a result, which cities thrive or decline.
Unlike the previous dominant class, says Brooks, this group does not assume that the traditional mores of elitism are necessary to secure their position. Many do not come from families with money. They wear funky clothing, are attracted to rough materials rather than smooth, gravitate to open-plan homes and an open lifestyle. They rely on their success in the university framework to get ahead. Brooks calls them out for shunning long-standing indulgences of the wealthy, but at the same time spending their cash (of which some have a good deal thanks to the rise of tech) on their own status symbols. Says Brooks: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. They drink lattes purchased at coffee shops, drive Volvos and Lexus’s, and go to considerable lengths to get their children into elite schools and universities.
Bobos embrace principles of fairness and diversity in education and employment and support higher taxes to help the disadvantaged. In other ways they have not shown themselves to be attuned to genuine egalitarianism because they lack the traditional left’s emotional connection to the disadvantaged. They do not recognize that their preoccupations have pushed the blue-collar, trade union left out of the Democratic Party, privileging, as they do, college education and an intellectual egalitarianism where code words like Latinx and intersectionality have become cultural markers.
In the minds of their critics, Bobos’ compassion for immigrants constellated in the 1980s if not before when the US government was supporting right-wing, intolerant regimes in Central America, and US Sanctuary Movements welcomed and protected refugees whose lives were threatened. Even if the politics and economics of Central and South America have now evolved, compassionate Bobos have perpetuated a response to potential immigrants that assumes we in the US owe them something and therefore should allow them in with no discerning criteria.
American conservatives hold Bobos responsible for the challenge to traditional morality and the relevance of religion that have spread since the 1960s. Bobos have promoted the notion that sexual mores should be a matter of choice as long there is consent, that women have been marginalized in a multi-millennial power-system, and that, therefore, traditional family life must give way to a system where women’s primary focus is outside the home.
Conservatives look for consistent standards that undergird a moral order. What they see coming from Bobos is a mishmash of ideas about inclusion and identity that fail to hold people accountable in ways that they should. They see a feminization of culture where feeling has become the arbiter of experience.
When it comes to civil rights, Bobos have shown more interest in power imposed through culture (a view of things that emerged from the New Left in the 1960s which leads naturally to a focus on inclusion at the table of power) than to promoting a culture-neutral policy of resource sharing that allows all to draw on their interior resources to get ahead.
Bobos assume that they are conducting a righteous crusade against racism and other forms of oppression, particularly oppression of women. The right to decide for oneself about the appropriateness of abortion is central to the Bobo mindset. They discount the importance of religion if it opposes abortion. They lump all those on the right together as people who stand in the way of these values. Their intellectual self-confidence creates an unwillingness to consider the validity of other ways of viewing the world.
According to Brooks, the first book to highlight the Bobo phenomenon came out in 1983. Literary critic Paul Fussell, in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, describes, in parallel to other American social groups, a group he calls “X people.” Says Brooks, paraphrasing Fussell, these people were “highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. X people tend to underdress for social occasions, Fussell wrote. They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility.” By giving these people the X designation, Fussell suggests such people operate outside of class designation, and have created a way of life free of class assumptions. But forty years after Fussell’s book was published, we recognize he was describing the elite of our time, and captured the naivete of that elite for believing they had come up with some universal stance towards life that could only be designated by “X.”
The arrogance of this assumption is what stares us in the face right now, in October 2024. Bobo self-satisfaction has considerable responsibility for the anti-Left stance of the American Right. Bobos lost a grasp of the concerns of the blue-collar people who would never expect to go to university, who relied on trade unions to assure their future. That group has found solider ground in the rejection of the Bobo elite. Bobos do not know how to honor the values of those who find abortion an affront to their faith. Bobos speak of social justice, know how to be polite and pleasantly interactive with supermarket cashiers, and treat domestic workers with respect when they enter their homes. But they have no expectation of being genuine friends with such people, and do not reflect on the way they have alienated them.
Now Bobos have become something close to an identity group. David Brooks commented on this state of affairs in 2021 by pointing out how he himself had been misled by the Bobo phenomenon two decades earlier:
The educated class, in spite of its homage to openness, turns out to be more closed than elite classes of the past, because it hides behind the idea that anyone can get in if they have what it takes. In fact, it is rigged to advantage people who have learned their hidden cultural cues from elite schools and pretend these cues do not exist. Shamus Rahman Khan, whose book Privilege is a sociological study of St. Paul School in New Hampshire, emphasizes that these cues, signifying accepted codes of behavior, can only be absorbed through long association with elite institutions.
The right has its own elite. Traditional Reagan Republicans, who value their hard-earned individual wealth unapologetically and maintain their right to enjoy it, ally with a property-owning right-leaning gentry who hang onto family property over generations. But in our current alignment of mindsets, the elite of the right finds no common ground with the elite of the left, indeed they feel belittled by them. As a result, they tilt to Trump who at least delivers scorn to the group that derides them.
When Republicans look at Kamala Harris, they see someone whose trajectory has been assisted, indeed infected, by Bobo values. Their dislike of this set of assumptions is a huge obstacle to voting for her that operates separately from her objective merits. We see Kamala Harris attempting to shift this view of her by her choice of Tim Walz as running mate, and by playing down identity politics - not harping on the fact she is a woman and a person of color. Most importantly, she expresses her position on abortion as “your religious or ethical values might cause you to decide not to have an abortion, but the government should not be making this decision for you.” Last night on CNN, when asked by one questioner what faults she has, she spoke of herself as a “nerd.” She underlines that she wants to be a bridgebuilder.
But Kamala needs help. How can Bobos move beyond their insularity to create a cultural space where more people are honored and respected? As a highly intelligent segment of the population, surely they have the capacity to re-examine assumptions and propose a realignment of language and values. A key piece of this, according to Brooks, will be to shift the system away from over-valuing university education so that it confers dignity on vocational schools and service professions.
Whoever wins on November 5, we will have to grapple with this issue.
Every vote counts in this election
Twenty-eight days to go…
The upcoming presidential election in the US is likely to be one of the closest, if not the closest, in our history. This means challenges, recounts, and accusations of voter fraud are likely to be part of the picture. How will the system handle this? In 2020Joe Biden won the Georgia popular vote by 11,779 votes. This gave him all the Electoral College votes from Georgia. As we all know, Donald Trump tried to persuade the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes. But the Secretary of State and the mechanisms of the state’s election system pushed back and delivered the state to Biden.
In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. In this case the Supreme Court stepped in to decide the outcome of the election.
A flurry of challenges to voting practices
According to the watchdog organization Protect Democracy, in the three years between the 2020 election and the end of 2023, state legislatures introduced over 600 pieces of legislation many of which seemed designed to upend non-partisan election practices by encouraging misinformation, disruption, confusion, and manipulation. Sixty-two of these became laws in 28 states.
In March 2024, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel resigned, largely due to her unwillingness to take action on supposed ballot fraud in response to former President Trump’s bidding. Her successor, Trump protégé Michael Whatley, with co-chair Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, took over with a declared intention to increase “election integrity” lawsuits and monitoring.
Since then, we have seen lawsuits in nearly half the states challenging various aspects of election practice.
Forcing election officials to remove voters from the rolls
An oft-declared area of Republican concern is that election officials are poorly performing the maintenance of voter rolls and allowing ineligible people to remain registered. This tallies with one of Donald Trump’s most common claims: that millions of non-citizen voters are voting in U.S. elections.
In Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Alabama, efforts have been underway to cull voter rolls in ways that have the potential to take the vote away from legal voters. According to the Washington Post, these lawsuits do not offer evidence of large-scale illegal voting. The one in Nevada has already been thrown out.
In Texas in late August 2024, Governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021 over a million names had been eliminated from Texas’s voter rolls, including 6,500 “non-citizens.” This number included people who had moved, were deceased, or had felony records, as well as the 6,500 “non-citizens.” Of the “non-citizens,” less than a third had actually voted in the past.
Watchdog groups pointed out that both federal and state law require voter roll maintenance, so that this purging is a matter of routine, whereas the governor’s framing of this process as a protection against illegal voting could undermine trust in elections.
A key source of confusion, when it comes to “non-citizens,” is that non-citizens are able to get drivers’ licenses, and so their names appear as “non-citizen” in Department of Motor Vehicles records. So flagging legal voters as “non-citizens” can happen if information is outdated or someone checks the wrong box in error at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Texas is known to have made errors of this kind before. In 2019, the state cited 95,000 voters as “non-citizens” whereas after review many of the people identified on the rolls were found to be naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the resignation of the Texas Secretary of State.
“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” comments Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Kumar claims that the state invented the issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from voting, and “we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”
In Tennessee in June 2024, state officials warned over 14,000 suspected non-citizens that they could face penalties for voting illegally, based on data from the Department of Motor Vehicles. In this case at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were citizens. Election officials ultimately agreed not to remove the others from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.
In Alabama on August 16, 2024, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. Acknowledging that some of those people might have subsequently become naturalized citizens, he nevertheless designated all of them inactive voters unless they prove their citizenship, referring all 3,251 to the Alabama Attorney General’s office for further investigation.
A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. The letter says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory” and that the state can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days of an election.
On September 27, 2024, the US Department of Justice sued the State of Alabama and its top election official for allegedly removing voters from its election rolls too close to the November election.
Mailed ballots, drop boxes, and drive-through voting
Meantime, on September 24, 2024, a panel of federal judges heard arguments in a case that could alter the rules for counting mail ballots in Mississippi. The implications for the election tally in Mississippi would be small. But the ramifications for all other states could make this a big issue.
Mississippi law currently allows mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked on the date of the election or earlier and arrive up to five days after Election Day. Eighteen other states have similar laws. The Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, and two individuals are suing in a federal court of appeals to change the law, arguing that votes must be in by Election Day in order to be counted.
Democrats and voting rights advocates say Republicans are looking for ways to throw out valid votes because Democrats have disproportionately embraced voting by mail. Republicans respond that they simply want to abide by the letter of the law and limit possibilities for fraud.
In Pennsylvania, a swing state that could decide the November 5 election, the Republican National Committee recently filed a lawsuit that seeks to disqualify mail ballots when their outer envelopes are not dated or are misdated, even if they arrive by Election Day.
Lawsuits in Michigan and Arizona to limit ballot drop boxes and drive through voting grow out of a common Republican complaint that in 2020 election rules were changed to accommodate needs during the pandemic. The lawsuits argue that such practices do not conform with state election manuals setting out rules for administering elections. The Arizona suit has already been thrown out. The Michigan case is still making its way through the courts.
Gates McGavick, senior adviser to Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, dismisses criticism of this and other suits. “The idea that widely-supported election integrity safeguards somehow constitute ‘voter-suppression’ is a far-left conspiracy theory,” McGavick said in a statement.
Absentee voting
Other suits pertain to rules around absentee voting.
In Michigan, the Republican National Committee has claimed a victory in a case over the rules governing the verification of signatures on ballot envelopes.
Although Michigan’s Secretary of State Benson has said the suit will not appreciatively change the way clerks validate signatures, the election watchdog group Protect Democracy suggests that the ruling could have an effect on election workers, who may now reject more ballots unfairly. Protect Democracy bases this possibility on a comparison it ran of the Georgia general election in 2020 and the two U.S. Senate runoff races the following January that showed a rise in rejected signatures that researchers attributed a spike of misinformation, largely coming from Trump, about how much cheating occurs among voters using mail-in ballots.
The special case of Nebraska
A related, but also unique, case of attempting to alter election practices has arisen in the state of Nebraska, which is one of only two states (the other is Maine), where the Electors for the Electoral College are allocated proportionally to the popular vote in the state, rather than according to the winner-take-all practice embraced by all other states.
Nebraska, which has five electoral votes, generally goes to the Republican Party in the popular vote. But Nebraska’s constitution stipulates that if there is a single Congressional district that goes to the Democratic Party, then one Electoral vote must be allocated to a Democratic Elector. Traditionally, Nebraska’s Second Congressional District has gone to the Democrats, and is likely to do so again this year.
Donald Trump and his supporters recently tried to persuade Nebraska Republican Gov. Pillen to call a special legislative session to change this allocation of Electoral votes. Pillen agreed to do it if he had the votes. But Republican State Senator Mike McDonnell refused to go along with a change before the 2024 election, killing the plan. McDonnell asserts that if Nebraska’s Electoral system is to be changed, this should happen through a state-wide process and a constitutional amendment.
Changing the way Nebraska participates in the Electoral College could have decisive impact on the November 5 election. If Vice President Harris were to win the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, she would need only one more Electoral vote to reach the required 270 Electoral votes she needs to win. Without that one vote, the election would be tied. In that case, the House of Representatives elects the president, with each state’s delegation getting one vote. Because Republicans generally control more state delegations, a vote in the House of Representatives would very likely go to Donald Trump.