The Crowd Watches the Vote
Live from Damir's apartment, it's the 2024 results!
Samuel (1:48)
welp
Audrey (1:39 PM): For your Wednesday well-being. Advice on metaphysical hangovers:
Samuel Kimbriel (1:15AM): I’m fairly upset. With Damir I do think deep soul-searching is needed. What is the theory of civilization that has gotten crystalized in democratic arguments, and why is it collapsing?
Damir Marusic (12:35AM): I’m not thrilled about Trump winning. But it feels like it’s over. What this feels like is a reckoning. Too much happy thinking about values, about transcendental things not grounded in reality, is fundamentally off. There’s a way to do politics around this, but the Democrats’ approach is fundamentally off. Time for hard thinking.
Samuel Kimbriel (12:31): Just reminding you all how the UK does speeches at this point of the night.
Michael Wear (12:04 AM): Will Democrats regret at all that all but a few essentially went on the record calling for the filibuster to be eliminated? Republicans seem to be wary of long-term implications of getting rid of the filibuster, but, if elected, Trump is likely to put immense pressure on them to do so.
Samuel Kimbriel (11:59PM):
This from my friend Pete Davis seems exactly right to me. The question is not a matter of political consultancy or “tactics.” It’s a question of what does it mean to build a good society, a question which democrats have, frankly just not asked with any vigor recently.
Santiago Ramos (11:50PM): On CrowdSource this week, I posted a famous quote by the Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín: “Democracy is an even higher value than that of a mere form of legitimizing power, because with democracy one not only votes, but also eats. One is educated and healed…” He said this during a speech that put an end to 7 years of military dictatorship.
It’s an important question, for all of us — those who feel dejected and those who feel triumphant: Does democracy end on election night, or is it something inclusive of, but also more than, elections? Is democracy only a moment of legitimization, or is it also an ethic of conversation and consensus-building, built on respect and not on strife?
Santiago Ramos (11:42PM):
responds to :Re: Sam’s comment about political theory and immigration, some anecdotal empiricism. I generally don’t get worked up about how my siblings vote (about evenly split), but I was thinking about the way the Trump voters don’t even seem to notice that issue. They’ve done mission work in Mexico and Latin America, and one of our sisters in law is an undocumented Mexican immigrant. Her and my brother have taken in several of her young relatives for the Christian reasons all my siblings basically share. And yet.
Audrey (11:29PM): WoC function live look
Audrey (11:29PM): A little more apt light reading from Damir’s library
Samuel Kimbriel (11:21PM):
Santiago Ramos (11:18 PM): I am having a hard time finding the results for the Puerto Rico statehood referendum. Does anyone have a link?
Samuel Kimbriel (11:11PM): I saw this same look on a deer I met in the woods this morning.
Santiago Ramos (11:10 PM): Sam’s eyes are full of… fear. The one topic no one wanted to discuss tonight. But it’s unavoidable.
Audrey Horne (11:06 PM): Capturing a bit of wildlife.
Samuel Kimbriel (10:48PM): I’m getting nervous about the worst scenario, namely margins that are thin enough that this will drag on past one drunken evening into contested results for weeks.
Santiago Ramos (10:47PM):
writes to us from New Zealand:The mood in New Zealand is surprisingly quiet. I've heard nary a peep from anyone about the US election so far today. It's not always like this; when Donald Trump was first elected you could tell everyone in the office was refreshing their screens. This time around it's much quieter. I've seen TV news advertising over the past week or two with US election pictures, and my (American) husband mentioned yesterday that he was probably just going to be nervous until the results came in. Apart from that, even the sometimes-political family group chat is talking about my sister's college results instead ...
Damir Marusic (10:37PM): Mood is shifting bigly at the party. Dem anxiety is shifting to a kind of despair. Polite conservatives not yet gloating.
Audrey Horne (10:36PM): Friend says he expects Trump to win due to a state of unhappiness in the electorate… grocery prices up, sick of the current state, people just want results and they don’t trust Kamala to deliver.
Santiago Ramos (10:33PM):
writes: “I think what Democrats want, as much as victory, is the catharsis of a national verdict.” According to the ancient Greeks, catharsis is the product of tragedy…Michael Wear (10:31PM): Over on MSNBC, they’re rediscovering that “just because a voter is brown, doesn’t mean they’re an acolyte of the Democratic Party,” and expressing disappointment in working-class voters who need to get more engaged so that they’ll understand that their jobs are thanks to the infrastructure bill. Not super healthy reactions to the prospect of Trump winning!
Samuel Kimbriel (10:30PM): Lots of buzz in the comments about the lackluster condition of the democratic part which I think holds even under Harris victory. Biden in some way represented a détente… a period that was too sleepy to be strident. But the question now is just — where’s the party going to find sources of genuine moral vision to set an agenda? And if they can’t, how in the world are they going to be competitive?
Christine Emba (10:13PM): Tucker Carlson was explaining the other day that he believed demons invented nuclear technology. Not so sure about that, but pretty convinced that they have something to do with the needle. Not even its results, its existence — built explicitly to make people anxious and addicted to refreshing the NYT homepage. It’s cursed, toxic.
Also hi everyone, I’m back from doing some segments on British cable news, alongside Marianne Williamson and Stormy Daniels (?!), who seemed much more credible, frankly, than the former Democratic candidate.
The Rest of World seems — as it has for a while now, basically since Trump entered the scene — baffled and disappointed in the U.S. A palpable air of “how did you let it get this far?”
Samuel (10:12PM): Do needles lean?
Shadi Hamid (10:11PM): Exit polls showing Puerto Ricans breaking sharply for Trump. Great
bait.Audrey Horne (10:10PM):
Michael Wear (10:10PM): I think what Democrats want, as much as victory, is the catharsis of a national verdict. Such an emphatic statement, putting an end to the Trump era, is likely to elude them even if they keep The White House. Regardless of the outcome, Democrats will have to do some soul-searching regarding how deeply they really, truly feel about Trump, and those who support him. With an election behind them, does their contempt for MAGA stand? Or do Democrats themselves relieve some of the pressure that is required if you openly call the nominee of the opposition party “fascist?” You really saw this tension in the last couple weeks of the campaign, as Harris insisted she did not judge those who supported her opponent.
Damir Marusic (10:05PM): Yeah, the chili is red,
. It feels prophetic. But the truth is I went into this with a kind of double-negative: thrilled to see either side lose. But as time goes on, the reality is dawning: Trump has not flamed out, and it’s either going to be a grinding race, or a Trump victory. And that’s the mood here at the party. Lots of irony, lots of protection. But it could be Trump.Damir Marusic (9:55PM): There’s a real shift at the party. Glumness around Harris feeling more pronounced. Odd difference between the mood here and among my colleagues at the Post, where there’s seems to be a lot of tea-leaf reading going on. We’ll see how it looks in the cold hard light of day.
Audrey Horne (9:45PM): Damir made right-coded chili by the way.
Samuel Kimbriel (9:42PM): French wine, French books… American democracy.
Audrey Horne (9:50PM): Such will be our lot soon.
Rachel Rizzo (9:36PM): I agree with Damir on this one. If the Dems lose I’m really hoping they don’t decide to re-up RussiaGate for the next four years.
Damir Marusic (9:35PM): Rachel Maddow talking about Russian threats to voting precincts. It’s plausible.
However, the RussiaGate narrative in 2017 was a stain, and I shudder to think what’s coming should Trump win this.
Santiago Ramos (9:35PM): One great thing about the Crowd is that it comes from all over the world. Gemma hails from New Zealand and she’s been posting some interesting stuff. @Gemma, what is the mood like where you are? How crazy does the USA come off down there?
Damir Marusic (9:34PM): I think Biden could have done better. Unprovable. But I’ve felt it from the start.
Samuel Kimbriel (9:25PM): Ok time to start doing some moral philosophy. On the drive over to Damir’s I had a conversation with a family member about immigration. It’s striking how differently moods can go on this. The sense of threat, and need to “carve out” hard lines around countries, versus on my side, the broader that a good society is, the more it just can’t be ignorant in bubbles isolated from the weak.
Audrey Horne (9:16PM): Everyone keeps texting me to ask how the libs are feeling… how should I know????
Michael Wear (9:18PM): Just an update on Muslim numbers as I’ve been talking with Ryan Burge, the researcher who suggested a 24-point swing among Muslims. That’s not what we see if we look at 2020 Votecast data, which shows Trump winning 35% of Muslim voters in 2020.
Audrey (9:16PM): Everyone keeps texting me to ask how the libs are feeling… how should I know????
Rachel Rizzo (9:12PM): A quick nod to Michael’s tweet below because i think it deserves a spot on the homepage here: “Just note that if the exit poll numbers hold, this would mean Harris is performing *less* well among women than Biden did in 2020, pre-Dobbs.” Woof.
Kristina Saccone (9:11PM): While the others catch up on their martinis, I’ll post this without comment:
Shadi Hamid (9:10pm):
I’m not sure this is quite right. According to AP VoteCast, Trump won over 30% of Muslims in 2020. It’s one post-election survey and something of an outlier but regardless Trump did better than expected with Muslims last time around, in part because Trump completely forgot about us and focused his racism on other groups.Michael Wear (9:00PM): Paging
:
AP Votecast showing a 24-point jump of support for Trump among Muslim voters nationally. (Insert caveat about early exit poll reliability).
Michael Wear (8:58PM): On the gender gap:
Santiago Ramos (8:55PM): OK, this is what I am afraid of. The LATINO VOTE. I am not worried about Latinos voting. I am afraid that if we do not become a predictable variable in election prognostications, then the powers that be will try to redefine us.
Back in election night 2020, when it looked like Trump was going to win, The New York Times columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted: “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans and helps explains why Latinos support Trump at the second highest rate.”
Two objections to that. 1. Yes, “Hispanic” or “Latino” is a coherent category (read this book) and 2. Just because a group does not vote in American elections as a block, does not mean it is not a coherent category!
In the late 1990s, Puerto Ricans were excluded from Hispanic-directed scholarships in the U.S., by virtue of an incoherent definition of “Hispanic” concocted by some bureaucrat. Today, it looks like the Hispanic/Latino vote is going to do unpredictable things again. But that doesn’t mean anyone has a license to redefine what we are!
Rachel Rizzo (8:51PM): Ok just tuned in to CNN. These people are not looking thrilled. I think they need martinis more than we do.
Michael Wear (8:41PM): I just want to re-up this really keen insight from
: “I’ve really been struck by some of the interviews with Arab Americans in crucial swing states like Michigan. There’s this tension between social conservatism which pulls people toward Republicans, and the view that Harris would be more likely to support Palestinians’ right to self-determination.”Kristina Saccone (8:37PM): What is this abomination of a set? I see… the Capitol and the Washington Monument across the two-lane highway from the Alamo. Mount Rushmore is just off camera to the right. Fmr. Rep. Tim Ryan chills on the couch to the left.
Michael Wear (8:30PM): So far, it seems that generally Harris is holding up well with Black voters, according to early exits. Trump is winning 16% of Black men in Georgia, for instance, but that’s exactly what he received in 2020. Concerns about Trump making significant gains among Black men, in particular, might have been misplaced (or, you could argue, Democrats’ focus on Black men in closing weeks of campaign had its intended effect).
Another theme I’m seeing is that while the electorate is likely to be the most pro-choice electorate this century, while Trump is winning 90% or so of voters who believe abortion should be totally or mostly illegal, Harris is winning about 70% of those who believe abortion should be legal or mostly legal. See this trend in Pennsylvania, for instance:
Damir Marusic (8:30PM): The conservatives at the party are feeling a bit more optimistic than they might have been at the outset.
The mainstream vibes for the last few days have been that Kamala is winning in the final stretch — and nerdy D.C. conservatives have started to internalize the possibility. After all, Trump has been running a dumpster fire of an online campaign the last few days.
But I’m told by people who know that Trump’s team feels like all of this is Dem copium, and that there’s no data suggesting that Trump is in anything but a commanding position. And that view is starting to take hold here at the party.
Kristina Saccone (8:22PM): Versus Carville looking tired, and it’s not even 8:30…
Audrey Horne (8:11PM): Kornacki with the sleeves rolled up? He knows what he’s doing…
Santiago Ramos (8:11PM): Samuel Kimbriel I’m pretty sure there were no supermarkets in Plato’s time. Are you confusing him with Allen Ginsberg?
Audrey Horne (8:04PM): I’m soooo amped off this martini and also the vibes.
Samuel Kimbriel (8:03PM): I take this opportunity to remind everyone that Plato calls democracy “the supermarket of constitutions.”
Samuel Kimbriel (8:01PM): wait Santi…are you proposing that Shadi is on the level of Tocqueville?
Santiago Ramos (7:59PM): Samuel Kimbriel I don’t see Shadi’s book there.
Damir Marusic (7:58PM): Just want to forefront a debate I’ve been having with
for the better part of this year — about Muslims becoming a key swing constituency going forward after this election. Here’s Shadi’s dream scenario:
And a conclusion:
My counter:
Rachel Rizzo (7:56PM): Coming at you live from the Al Jazeera Arabic desk a block away from the White House! I’m waiting to go on air for the last interview of the day, and so far I’ve really been struck by some of the interviews with Arab Americans in crucial swing states like Michigan. There’s this tension between social conservatism which pulls people toward Republicans, and the view that Harris would be more likely to support Palestianians’ right to self determination.
Surprisingly, some interviews also show people believe Trump would be more likely to bring an end to Israel’s war in Gaza, which I think is more based in a real disdain for Joe Biden than a love of Trump. Let’s see how this plays out.
Michael Wear (7:53PM):
, the fact we would consider it to be a “shock” suggests the problem. Even though intellectually we know how close this race is and has been, what lies just below the surface of this “dispassionate” analysis among many in our circles is the assumption, contrary to the facts, that “of course, Trump can’t actually win.” This is the difficult thing about elections: they really do make you come to terms with how much of one’s strategy or analysis was really wishful thinking.Shadi Hamid (7:46PM): Okay guys, are you ready for a “prediction”? Here goes: much of the talk of Kamala’s momentum is overwrought. So many of us want Harris to win, so we're inclined to see confirmation of that desire in the latest polling.
But Trump was behind by a larger margin in the polls in 2016 and still won. He almost won in 2020 despite Biden opening up a wide lead in the final polls. If those trends hold, we'll probably be in for another shock tonight. As Trump has become more explicitly racist and unhinged in the final days of the campaign, there are also likely to be a growing number of shy Trump voters. The idea that shy Trump voters are no longer shy doesn't seem to be strongly supported by the available evidence. But I hope I'm 100% wrong about this, for obvious reasons.
Audrey Horne (7:45PM): I made dirty gin martinis for everyone!
Kristina Saccone (7:43PM): On Trump winning West Virginia: “They are making a regional clump through the eastern part of the midwest, Tennessee Valley really, and north” — Brian Williams’ live commentary is just like butter.
Samuel Kimbriel (7:40PM): Provisions…
Santiago Ramos (7:31PM): Andrew Robert Colom did not like my post about fear and dystopia:
I read it 7 times, it's not getting better. The brilliance of the FDR quote is that it both isolates the greatest fear while acknowledging it. Your point is just that people are afraid. Just not on the same level bro.
Fair enough. Maybe I should simplify my point: voters are more guided by fear than by hope. Avoiding something bad rather than hoping for something good.
Kristina Saccone (7:21PM): Raise your hand if, like me, you got another appeal from Kamala for $47 in the last ten minutes? This email promises to be “Asking one last time.” I find it hard to believe. Surely ActBlue (and its contemporaries) can come up with new reasons to pester for money late into the night.
Michael Wear (7:24PM): Here are some of the questions/interests I have looking at results come in tonight:
How wide is the gender gap? In 2016, with a female Democratic nominee and post-Access Hollywood, Hillary Clinton won among women by 54-42%, while Trump won among men from 53-41%. That’s a pretty significant divide! Will Harris come closer to winning 58-60% of women? If we see something closer to a 18-20-point gender gap, not only would that be extraordinary, but in my view, it would suggest a pretty troubling political and social dynamic for the country’s future.
How effective has Harris’ unprecedented focus on abortion been in this campaign? According to preliminary exit polls, only 14% of voters count it as their most important issue, but if the issue motivated young women, for instance, who would otherwise have not turned out, perhaps it will make the difference in a tough political environment for her campaign.
I am intrigued by the preliminary exit poll finding that, nationally, 46% of voters have a favorable opinion of only Harris, 42% of only Trump, 8% of neither and 2% of both. I tend to think Trump wins among those who have a favorable opinion of neither, but I’m interested in others’ instincts on that question.
I am not convinced that Biden could not have run at least as strong a campaign as Harris. There will be no way of knowing if Biden would have performed better, but those questions will be live if Harris does not hold the Blue Wall (WI, MI, PA), even if she is successful in states like GA, NV or AZ.
As the person who ran religious outreach for President Obama’s re-election campaign, I’m always watching the religious exit polls, which are particularly fraught this year. In addition to Hispanic Protestants, Catholics and white evangelicals, the Muslim and Jewish vote is going to be of real significance. I’m not sure if we’ll have exit poll data on Muslim voters, but if we do, I’m looking at Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia, in particular.
Damir Marusic (7:15PM): Independents going for Trump in Georgia according to exit polls? As the pundits try to nail down what this means, I’m studying second-order effects on the pundits’ moods. Feels a little like early panic.
Santiago Ramos (6:50PM): FDR’s legacy lives on in many ways, but it has wholly disappeared in one, crucial way: Fear.
Today, we do not fear fear itself; we indulge in it.
Fear motivates our politics. Every political tribe is guided by its dystopia of choice. Liberals have The Handmaid’s Tale; the Right has 1984. An older type of social conservative would cite Brave New World as a measure for the future that they wanted to avoid. What about the Bernie left? Maybe Children of Men? Elysium? Deficit hawks have Americathon; the Bar Stool Conservatives might like Demolition Man. And Idiocracy? Well …
So, Crowd: What are you afraid of? Which dystopian nightmare haunts your dreams? What do you most fear happening as a consequence of today’s election? We might as well get the scary stuff out of the way early.
Damir Marusic (6:40PM): I’ve been watching CNN while I prep, if for nothing else just to marvel at the capacity of talking heads to talk at length with almost nothing happening.
The only thing that we’ve seen so far are some preliminary exit polls, which show a very unhappy electorate. The kind of nasty fight it kicked off between the pundits — whether this is because people are unhappy with Democrats or whether they’re unhappy with what Trump has done to our politics — has been something to behold. Nerves are running high. It feels like the country is on edge.
Damir Marusic (6:30PM): Guests should start arriving in about half an hour. I’m expecting a really interesting group of people — famous and less famous, right and left, named and unnamed — to watch tonight’s vote go down.
Really excited to have
, , and , as well as our dear friends and stalwarts , , and , to help us capture some of the nervy energy in the room, and in our heads.Me, I’m still prepping — mostly cleaning the apartment. On the menu: a whole pile of Chile con Carne (Kenji’s recipe), a bunch of modernist liquid cheese, and maybe a pizza or ten should people still be peckish. There will be martinis, as well as a whole array of less alcoholic options, to take the edge off. And I’ve bought cigarettes for people to take to the roof if it all becomes too much.
We’re going as long as it takes! And though we’d love to have you, the Crowd, with us, my apartment is only so big. So do leave comments below and we’ll get to them.
Greetings from Bria and Santi’s apartment in Inwood!
have a good party!