a short election post

then we will return to newlessness

Edit on November 7, 2024: I cannot stress enough that this newsletter does not cover the news. There are maybe two posts that glance on “current events” a year. Don’t subscribe if you want stuff about the news!

A while ago I saw a tweet which I can’t find anymore, but it was making fun of Zachary Levi, a not very famous actor, doing a Trump event. The joke was that he wasn’t very famous and that his appearance wouldn’t sway anybody—I can’t find the tweet anymore (I tried) but the joke was something like “if everybody who saw Shazam votes for Trump now, he’ll pick up twelve votes.” (Since I am on record as believing celebrity endorsements don’t matter, I was silently like, probably not twelve.) When I clicked on the video, though, what I noticed was that the event was in Dearborn, Michigan.

Which was not a town or a state in which it would be good for Trump to pick up any margin of votes. The actual story of this video was that Trump was doing events in Dearborn, not that he had Z-list celebrities doing them. In 2020 Trump’s share of the vote in Dearborn was 30%.

And, in fact, Kamala Harris lost southern Dearborn, though I doubt Zachary Levi had anything to do with that. (Trump bumped his share up to 42%, and managed to win because of a wave of probably protest votes for Jill Stein.)

I don’t think Harris lost because of Gaza (except, possibly, in Michigan). I do think that whenever she was forced to address Gaza somehow, her answers became weird and confused. It was clear she did not know how to position herself on the issue, and it highlighted the ways in which she was both running as a continuation of the Biden administration and as a “change” candidate. And I don’t think Harris lost because of chasing high profile endorsements celebrity and otherwise, or because she seemed to thank Dick Cheney for his service to the country, or whatever. I think the story that will emerge through the polling data will tell a story that’s complicated but also probably a little boring.

But when I wrote the celebrity endorsements article for the Times, my point was that we vote for politicians because they do stuff for us. In the comments (which I read for some reason) a lot of people acted like I was some sort of starry-eyed idealist, a cross between Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and a School House Rock episode. They were like nobody would refuse to vote for Kamala Harris presented this alternative, if you’re an Arab-American in Dearborn, well, you’re stuck, you have to vote for us because the alternative is Donald “Muslim Ban” Trump. (At the same time they also believed people’s opinions to be easily swayed by Taylor Swift.)

Actually, though, my position is not idealist. It is practical. People vote for you if you do stuff for them. Doing stuff for us is their job. Rashida Tlaib crushed her opponent and she made it clear that she cared about issues local to her voters,¹ like Kroger and price gouging. Tlaib is not somehow less controversial than Kamala Harris! But she understands her job.

By and large, Republicans also get this. Republican politicians are mindful of their base because they know they can be replaced. If you vote Republican, you are voting for somebody who might make good on like 5% of what you want, and those 5% wins add up over time. Democrats, as a party, do not get this. That’s their problem. Individual Democrats do, but as a party, no. When I watch Democrats operate I feel like I’m watching somebody step on a rake while being repeatedly warned “you’re stepping on a rake, it’s going to hit you in the face” and then they do it but somehow the person who gets hit in the face by the rake is me.

For what it’s worth: I did decide to hold my nose and vote for Kamala in Michigan because I was so repulsed by J.D. Vance spreading stories about Haitian immigrants whose veracity he admitted he didn’t even know. But I don’t blame anybody who did not do so because they felt like they were voting for nothing.

So to return to the ominous Shazam tweet—this mindset of, who cares about this because we have the cool people—nobody cares that you have the cool people either. Kamala is brat etc but… have you ever actually looked at how many people are listening to brat? It is not a lot of people. Voters care about what you can do for them. You can’t win an election by threatening to lose.

Turning off comments on this because I can’t really keep an eye on the comments today. As ever, it’s a great day to donate to Doctors Without Borders if you have the money.

1. Edited to replace “them” with “her voters” because I realized “them” was totally unclear.