If you have been wondering why the Toteboard has been so quiet lately, the answer is simple: everything was just too hopelessly depressing to write about. The Trump indictments and SCOTUS’s apparent readiness to let him off multiple hooks, the Mideast and Ukraine wars that have crossed red line after red line, the confluence of Biden’s decline and the American electorate’s collective amnesia. Mass shootings, ecological disasters, a global catalogue of ethnic conflicts and political tinderboxes. And a country divided, seemingly hopelessly and violently so, on pretty much every one of these issues, while its educational system – the best hope for any future rapprochement – plunges relentlessly down the toilet. What light of sanity could the Toteboard shed on an increasingly insane world?
And so the Toteboard would begin one post, only to abandon it when the situation at hand grew more dispiriting. And then, sometime later on, lather, rinse, repeat. Perhaps someday scholars will unearth all these unfinished drafts and bind them into a volume to sell next to Go Set a Watchman.
But it’s amazing how quickly things can change, or at least how quickly one piece of things can change. On July 20, sudden torrential rains washed away a Connecticut picnic, transforming a lovingly constructed fruit salad into a bowl of multi-colored mush. But on July 21, Joe Biden finally conceded the obvious, clearing the way for a narrow beam of sunlight to peek into what had heretofore promised to be a shipwreck of an election.
Three weeks later, it’s clear that we have a contest on our hands, a contest that can finally charge up all the liberal, progressive, and lefty good-guys (like the Toteboard) who have been mired in a dull hibernation.
Which means that it’s time to reflect on how we got here and, more importantly, where we are going over the next three months.
The Primaries: What Primaries?
It’s hard to believe that there actually were presidential primaries, because nobody has written or read anything about them since the very first events. They were, of course, effectively over before they began, which is pretty strange because the anointed candidates in both parties were historically unpopular. But, democratic front-benchers decided it was better not to rock the boat, and republican voters failed to wake from their collective psychosis. And so, here we were again.
The Democrats: Political analysts correctly portrayed Biden’s less than overwhelming victories against uncommitted delegate slates as signs of his weakness as a candidate, though they probably overestimated how much of this was due only to his fucked-if-you-do, fucked-if-you-don’t response to the Middle East war. The truth was that Biden had already been experiencing a significant erosion of public confidence since the earliest days of his presidency, with the needle first moving in the wrong direction during his 2021 withdrawal of troops from Berserkistan, and never recovering. His approval rating had been well under water by all metrics since then, without ever coming up for oxygen even briefly.
While there was no question that Biden had put both his party and his country at grave risk by pulling a stubborn RBG, the Toteboard did have at least some sympathies with him because his administration had indeed proven better than effective at furthering progressive causes. If you look at his court appointments, his legislative successes, and the economic, educational, and environmental battles he continues to fight (and sometimes win) against knee-jerk republican obstruction in an evenly divided Congress and hopelessly lost SCOTUS, Biden really did deserve some good grades. But as NPR’s Mara Liasson noted just after the 2022 midterms, “The problem is that they oversold and under-delivered, even though what they delivered by any normal metric would have been pretty impressive.”
More importantly, Biden was simply from the beginning a poor spokesperson for his own administration. While he was never exactly William Jennings Bryan on the stump, or Stephen Douglas on the debate stage, Uncle Joe did at one time boast an intellectual quickness on his feet, a sharp Irish wit, and a no-malarkey ability to connect with other everyday Joes. But that’s not the Biden that had been in the public eye this last year or two, and that melted down during his disastrous debate with Trump. After an initial openness to news conferences and press interrogations, Biden pretty much fixed himself in the public imagination as being detached, unavailable, inarticulate, and/or confused. There was certainly no small amount of age-ism at work here, amplified no doubt by republican jackals who smelled a little blood in the water, but it really did require no small modicum of denial to continue trusting the health and safety of the world with someone who struggled to form coherent sentences and looked like he might fall over at any moment.
On the subject of possibly unfair perceptions, the following is lifted verbatim from one of those discarded drafts, this one from early May: “The Toteboard would like to observe briefly that the animus toward Kamala Harris in many progressive circles seems to be based far more on personality than policy. Most of her antagonists seem hard pressed to articulate criticisms of specific things she has said or done while in office, or identify places where they find her on the wrong side of a particular issue. If anything, it seems to have more to do with her supposed ‘invisibility’ i.e., her failure to become closely identified with one or more specific administrative goals, but of course that may not have been her call to make. ‘What has she done?’ one hears ad nauseam. That, and that her voice and vocal delivery are really grating. True, but seriously?” Funny what three months can do.
In the best of all worlds, Biden would have honored his promise to be a “transitional” president, announced shortly after the midterms his decision to step down after one term, and (as suggested by Atlanta Journal-Constitution political reporter Patricia Murphy) allowed/encouraged his party to engage in a lively, thoughtful, public debate about its vision of that transition. Of course, Biden’s belated and reluctant decision to step aside deprived the party of that opportunity, but perhaps will have proven to be for the better. Much to Trump’s chagrin, the democrats avoided the intra-party blood-letting common in contested primaries, which could have produced bruised feelings, frayed allegiances, and a seriously weakened candidate. And frankly, the optics would have been pretty terrible if they had chosen anyone other than Harris, which would have effectively stuck a thumb in the eye of the party’s most loyal and efficacious constituency. As Georgia knows pretty darn well, without energized African American female voters, there would be no Raphael Warnock, no Jon Ossoff, and no senate majority. For that matter, probably no Joe Biden. So far, the Harris love-fest is sailing along, and her choice of Tim Walz seems to have struck just the right tone. Of course, the honeymoon will eventually end, and the skeletons will start rattling their way out of the closet, but let’s hope the happy vibes continue for at least another three months.
The Republicans: If the pundits correctly noted Biden’s less than stellar performance during the democratic primaries, they pretty much booted what was happening on the republican side, as they portrayed Trump’s drubbing of Nikki Haley as indicative of a clear partisan mandate. What they failed to notice, or failed to notice with any consistency, was that Trump was essentially running as an incumbent in exile, with all of the incumbent’s usual arsenal of advantages in terms of funding, endorsements, campaign infrastructure, state party connections, and so forth. And for the de facto incumbent to fall under 60% in the first three contests was hardly a ringing endorsement. Trump, too, was a badly damaged candidate from the beginning. But unlike Biden, Trump has no intention of stepping aside for the good of the party, or the good of the country. And for the time being, almost all of the “sane” republicans – yes, that’s an oxymoron – are too chicken shit to voice their misgivings publicly. Where we stand now, and where we have stood since 2016, Trump is the republican party, and he is hellbent on remaking the country in his image as well.
With a hobbled Biden and a demoralized democratic party, Trump and his inner circle of shit-nosed sycophants looked ready to run on a platform (if you can call it that) of unadulterated Trumpism: xenophobia, racism, isolationism, promises to reward political cronies, punish political enemies, further corrupt the judiciary, and otherwise abuse executive powers for personal and political gain, i.e., all the classic earmarks of fascism. And of course, the continued normalizing of dishonesty, misogyny, bullying, and just about anything else that ratchets up social tensions and raises the emotional temperature. In short, Trump promised to duplicate, and exceed on steroids, the dysfunction and malevolence of his nightmarish days as president. His choice of JD Vance as veep offered little hope that Trump II would produce a kinder and gentler edition.
But after the recent burst of Kamala-mentum, Trump probably has to do some serious recalibrating, and it’s a nice bit of serendipity that he missed his best chance for publicly doing so, thanks to an accidental assist from Uncle Joe. While we may be pissed at the guy for staying in the race as long as he did, Biden’s decision to pass the torch after the republican convention effectively deprived Trump of the opportunity to frame his campaign against Harris on the big stage. Trump now looks a lot like a villainous bad-guy wrestler, who had thought he was going to pummel a hapless jobber in his next match, but instead drew an evenly matched babyface (i.e., good guy) opponent and suddenly looks a lot less self-assured in his trash-talk. Actually, he’s been looking seriously unhinged lately – even trying to evoke sympathy for himself by arguing that Biden got a raw deal – and that’s been almost amusing to watch.
The Electoral Backdrop:
So how do things stand now? Well, to answer that, the Toteboard needs to plunge into a little bit of electoral history (of course).
Despite some truly bizarre presidential contests, the electoral college map has looked largely unchanged since roughly 2000. When Obama first ran for election in 2008, the Toteboard (actually, the pre-blog Toteboard) identified 21 states (plus DC), mostly northeast, west coast, and upper midwest (CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, IA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, PA, RI, VT, WA, WI) that made up the democratic base, for a total of 257 votes. This was, of course, pretty close to the magic number of 270. With the republicans controlling the south and plains states, this left the Purple Six, i.e., a half-dozen other states (CO, FL, NC, NV, OH, VA) that had become competitive in recent years. The Toteboard further divided these into the Big Cahunas (FL, OH), either of which would have been sufficient to swing the race to the dems, the Indigo Three (CO, NV, VA), previously red swing states that seemed to be trending democratic, and the Burgundy One (NC), the only remaining swing state that still leaned republican.
The map has remained largely unchanged, but various demographic shifts (e.g., the expansion of urban and exurban areas, reallocation of electoral votes) and slight partisan realignments (mainly the white working class toward republicans, and suburbanites, especially women, toward democrats), have produced subtle but very important changes to the map. Here is a summary of them:
1) The Numbers: Due to reallocation, the “Obama Base” now totals only 253 electoral votes.
2) The Base: One state from the original Obama Base, i.e., Iowa (6), is now reliably red. No other state has turned so far, so fast. What's more, Trump picked off MI (15), PA (19), and (WI) in 2016, effectively turning two of them Indigo and one of them purple.
3) The Purples: The two Big Cahunas, Ohio (17) and Florida (30) have turned red. The previous Indigo Three, CO (10), NV (6), and VA (13) have turned more reliably blue, although Nevada, with its shifting and highly elastic electorate, is still teetering on the edge of purplish (you hear that, Barry?). The Burgundy NC (16) is unchanged.
4) The New Purples: Thanks to the previous two election cycles, discussed at length in a post related to the 2022 Georgia senate runoffs, two previous entries in the Red base, AZ (11) and GA (16), have apparently purpled.
5) The split delegations from NE and ME may matter more than ever in a close election. More on that in future posts . . . if it comes to that.
If you are starting to think that this resembles a game of trading monopoly deeds, or swapping baseball contracts, you wouldn’t be too far off. Obama appeared to cement a “permanent” democratic majority with the addition of the Indigo Three, but Trump iced the Big Cahunas and peeled off three pieces of the Blue Firewall, which might have meant curtains had the democrats not poached a pair of New Purples. On balance, these changes have benefited the republicans somewhat since the Obama years, which means that this election really is starting just about dead-even, with the republicans still holding a slight electoral college bias and Harris appearing to energize the previously lethargic base of disillusioned young voters, African Americans, and progressives.
The Electoral Future:
So what should we be watching? Well, it starts with current swirls of reds, blues, and purples:
State | 2012 Color | 2022 Color |
Arizona | Red | Purple |
Colorado | Indigo | Blue |
Florida | Purple | Red |
Georgia | Red | Purple |
Iowa | Blue | Red |
Michigan | Blue | Indigo |
Nevada | Indigo | Blue |
North Carolina | Burgundy | Burgundy |
Ohio | Purple | Red |
Pennsylvania | Blue | Indigo |
Virginia | Indigo | Blue |
Wisconsin | Blue | Purple |
Barring unexpected (and inexplicable) changes in established voting patterns, the race is going to be fought, and won, in the right-hand column states that are showing Purple, Indigo, or Burgundy (plus the might-be, might-not-be Blue Nevada): Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In other words, we’re kind of exactly where we were in the 2016 election, and the 2020 election, and the 2022 midterms. But while the playing field is the same, we really don’t know yet which way things are going to turn. Will Kamala be able to win with the erstwhile Blue Firewall of MI, PA, and WI? Will the republican attack machine eventually blunt her momentum? Will Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, or even one of the split districts in Nebraska or Maine ultimately provide the tipping point? The only thing for certain is that media outlets in those seven states will probably be tripling their advertising revenues over the next quarter, while Rhode Islanders and Idahoans have no choice but to continue marketing their calamari and deep-fried bull testicles respectively.
Actually, the only thing truly for certain is that the Toteboard will be there to accompany you through these next three wild months.
Comments