One of the thing I do not talk about nearly as often as I would like on this blog is language. Vivisection is one of my favorite words because it is Latinate, but of English origin. There’s something delightfully, subtly English about it, like if Parliament wore togas for a day. If it were from Latin, it would roughly mean “divided life”, but it was created in the 1700s to give the very specific sense of conducting a dissection on a still-living subject.
As I write this, the Biden campaign is still very much alive and with a clear path to victory. It’s coming down to the wire in several states that owe us absentee ballots in very blue areas; we are owed a blue shift but the question hangs if it will shift enough. Worryingly, such a precarious path is subject to the whims of McConnell-packed courts. I dare not prognosticate if the patient makes it or not. Before I get to the main part of this piece, I must be very clear: Suggesting Trump is winning in states still expecting a blue shift lends legitimacy to his attempt to claim that Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, or Wisconsin are somehow engaged in voter fraud by counting all the ballots that came in. The patient has a fairly strong pulse and any hot-take that Biden has lost in an in-kind gift to Trump’s forthcoming legal battle to disenfranchise absentee ballots.
This is a vivisection, not a post-mortem.
I’d like to offer two launching points for the eventual dissection of what has happened here. The first is that Biden has done well and the big problem is not enthusiasm. The second is that is that counterfactuals should have to meet a high standard of proof.
At the time of writing this, Biden is up by 2,283,125 in the popular vote, and has added nearly 7 million to Clinton’s total. Both gaps are expected to widen in Biden’s favor given where ballots remain uncounted. Wisconsin, which was just called for Biden, had more Democratic (and democratic!) turnout than ever before. Say what you will about him, but Biden either got Democrats hyped or Democrats didn’t need Biden to hype them.
I’m not unsympathetic to an honest accounting of Biden’s shortcomings; however, the people making them near-universally didn’t like Biden in the primary and while that’s a that’s a fair cop, let’s not kid ourselves. I called him a vaguely racist fossil a year ago and I stand by the broad outlines of those frustrations, but it has never really been in question that Biden was going to be the more popular candidate. Nothing about the returns we have or are expecting to get changes that analysis. The defect here is systemic; we have a system that intentionally gives more weight to plantation owners that translates into soft-disenfranchisement if you live in a populous state. I think we all know the arguments against the Electoral College, and I won’t repeat them at length. Suffice it to say, Biden is popular in the normal sense of the word and had a lot of enthusiasm by the simplest way we can measure it: people willing to go out and vote for him.
This bridges neatly to my second point. The forgoing argument this invites is that X candidate had the traits to win the Electoral College votes in some swing state or would be enough more popular to make this a landslide. The thing about these arguments is they are unfalsifiable. The argument against any of them is pretty simple: No one did better than Biden in the primary. That’s certainly not ironclad proof another candidate wouldn’t have taken more GOP votes—and all that is separate from the moral worth of any given candidate. (I voted Warren, after all, and she struggled to make a base.) But in the US, you do actually get a test-run to see if there is a large, enthusiastic base and the candidate who most clearly had it was…Joe Biden. I’m wary of baroque demographic analyses because it is very easy to put your thumb on the scale, even in good faith*.
The elephant (well, let’s be honest, small bird) in the room is Sanders. Biden consistently polled ahead of Sanders in the head-to-head question, even after the primary ended. I’ve seen demographic cases for why this is misleading, but try to imagine what it looks like to someone with no stake. I am hardly unbiased here, but this looks like special pleading to me. You’re arguing you have secret votes the rest of us can’t see because you’re good at class analysis and I just…wish people making this argument were clearer how big this leap of faith really is. The simplest read of the evidence is that Sanders did worse in national elections in the winter and would therefore do worse in a national election in the fall.
The points here are threefold. First, it isn’t over. Since I started writing this, Biden took a nominal lead in Michigan and won Wisconsin; this is a vivisection. Second, the eventual post-mortem—no matter who wins—must take into account Biden’s historically high turnout when evaluating him. Third, the evidence for alternatives, especially in light of the second point, is naturally murky and requires ignoring Occam’s razor to arrive at.
I don’t know what the next few years hold for America. I do know by the way popular power is measured, Biden has clearly won this thing. A post-mortem that does not acknowledge that is one that takes for granted how deeply anti-democratic the general election really is no matter who we run.
And for goodness’ sake, get ready to fight a power grab in the Courts.
*I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say a movement whose literal spokesperson has founded a podcast called Bad Faith may not be entirely interested in a good faith discussion. But I think most people reading this are, and in that spirit I implore you to turn some of the truly—unironically—excellent media criticism the left does on the people feeding you the “Bernie could have won” narratives. This is the ice cold take that a media bubble where the self-proclaimed “dirtbag left” can thrive may not be showing you a representative slice of the electorate and what they think.
Proof of Burden 