The Dog That Didn't Bark

As with many things in life, it's hard to notice the things that aren't there, but should be.

I remember my own personal experience of a number of US elections. The way I used to characterize them was that once every four years, people who ordinarily got along with each other pretty well had to scream at each other for a whole year, over things that neither of them could have any control over. Then the election would pass, and people would mostly get on with their lives.

There was also the inevitable rolling back of the start of the election cycle ever sooner. It kind of became like Christmas in the Anglosphere outside America - without Thanksgiving as a hard constraint on when the celebrations could start, you'd see Christmas decorations going up in November, then in October. Elections worked the same way. The buzz, then the party debates, then the primaries, then more party debates, then the conventions. Lord, how I hated the conventions. Just ghastly cliches aimed at true believer rubes. And then the presidential debates themselves, perfectly triangulated to sound compelling to 103 IQ midwits tuning in, sure that they'd learn important things about policy in America to help them make up their mind. I couldn't watch any of them, from either party, for more than a few minutes without feeling like I was being marketed to in a very obvious fashion, on the assumption that I was a moron.

When Trump got elected, there was a very temporary deflating on the left, which lasted about a day, mostly due to shock and disbelief. Then it geared up into protest (protesting an election outcome while professing to still believe in democracy? what does that even mean?), and finding a way to impeach him before he'd even taken office. 

And then, the rancor, normally limited to the election run-up, just became 24/7 in perpetuity. If Trump getting elected created a ton of schadenfreude on the election weary outer right, at some point the whole thing started to mostly be draining. All shared goodwill in America seemed to be eaten up by it. 

So given all this, I was utterly dreading the 2020 election.

And yet, here we are, less than three months out from the election, and instead there is... nothing. You could be forgiven for forgetting most days that it's actually going on. The level of energy devoted to the election itself is insanely low. There is a lot of energy about black lives matter protests, which you can take as a surrogate get-out-the-vote for the left. But there is almost nothing about the election itself.

To take a simple example - how many "Biden for President" signs do you see around your neighborhood? I'm in a pretty blue area, and the answer is approximately "zero".  

Crucial, basic questions remain unanswered. Will people be voting by mail? Will polling booths be open? Who knows! 

I don't pretend to know for sure what's going on there, but there are a few aspects to consider.

One is that this is strategic, a decentralised media strategy to conceal the extent of Joe Biden's mental decline, and just hope that dissatisfaction with Trump will carry the day. 

This might work to a certain extent, but I just don't think they could ordinarily help themselves. There's just too many juicy stories, too much power floating around, too many opportunities to land some exclusive injuring one's political enemies.

It's possible that Covid is just drawing too much of the energy away. But I think this hypothesis pretty much died around May, when the George Floyd protests kicked in in earnest. At that point, nobody in America even pretended to give a damn about Covid, and once that seriousness passed, it was very hard to get it back again. So I don't think there's a sense that Covid is so deathly important that we can't possibly consider mundane matters like who the president will be in three months' time.

My best guess, however, is is related to this paper. If your area had rain on the day of the initial tea party protests in 2009, you had significantly lower vote share for Republicans at the 2010 midterms. In other words, the whole monstrous circus of all the election theatre spectacle actually serves to get people fired up. Covid may not be considered important enough to drown out all other news, but it is important enough to stop tens of thousands people getting crammed into stadiums to host political rallies, or put in auditoriums to listen to presidential debates. Could you host the debate over zoom? Of course you could. Just like you can play NBA games to empty stadiums. Yet for some reason, nobody wants to watch either one. 

Every in-person event that drove the presidential news cycle is canceled. Take that away, and it seems the media just doesn't know what to do. How do you get people fired up? It turns out, it's quite hard. 

A final related aspect that's missing, which is probably even harder to spot, is the absence of lots of casual workplace conversations with people who might be of political opinions. If there's a person in America not heartily sick of zoom calls with anyone other than close friends and loved ones, I'd be surprised. Nobody's turning up to get into pointless arguments with friends and acquaintances, and so the whole cycle of disagreement, fury, righteous indignation, and seeking out new people to vent to / agree with / disagree with is also broken. 

All of this means that my priors on what's going to happen this election are probably wider than in any one I can remember. The most important thing is not the issues, or even the candidates. It's the bizarre, de-energising atmosphere the whole thing is taking place in, and whose voters end up being less lethargic on the day. On that question, I have no idea.