Where I Was Wrong, Where I Was Right, and Why Technology Changes Everything

            So close, and yet, so far. That’s the phrase that keeps entering my mind, one week from Election Day. After the reality of election night set in, I was initially despondent for a day. However, time heals all wounds and despite swearing off politics, I’m finding myself pulled back into it all.

            Coming into the election, I predicted that Romney would win. I am obviously wrong on that point, but I want to also address that point I made about liberalism reaching a dead end. After reading and responding to comments, I think I was only partially wrong on that front. My point still stands, but I do want to make some modifications to it. How often do you read or see someone admitting they were wrong! Intellectual humility is in short supply on both sides of the aisle, but alas, this is nothing new.

            Finally, I want to make a point on the debate over the shifting electorate and whether this election marks a new era of democratic ascendency. I think that the rise of technology has fundamentally changed the nature of the electoral game, with dangerous implications for Republicans.

Election

            Before Election Day, I explained how I was of two mindsets about the election. On one hand, Romney was leading in the national polls, despite a large oversampling of Democratic turnout. On the other hand, Obama had comfortable margins in all of the state polls. I made a final point that the cheapness of local media outlets’ polling could be skewing the results against Romney.

            I was wrong. But I was only wrong about one critical point. The 2008 Democratic turnout, far from being a onetime anomaly, did not go away. It was replicated in 2012. Romney won independents, but independents and Republicans weren’t enough to overcome the democratic turnout wave. I thought we’d have a D+3 or +4 electorate, which means that registered Democrats hold a three to four point advantage in terms of total makeup of the Election Day electorate. The initial results suggest that it was D+6 electorate, an outcome unexpected by many forecasters and pundits, including myself. Had I correctly gauged turnout, I would have been right. But then again, so would everyone else.

The End of Liberalism

            A week or so before Election Day, I made a post concerning what I saw was an intellectual dead end for liberalism. I thought that on social issues, the war was already over with the left having won. However, on the fiscal front, I argued that the welfare state was in danger, with no money to expand, or even fund, it and a middle class entirely resistant to tax hikes.

            The passage of gay marriage referenda in several states, the reelection of Obama, the legalization of pot, and even the passage a large tax hike in California for people making over $250,000 would argue that not only was I wrong, but I was severely wrong (to borrow a turn of phrase from the Mittster). I also had several commentators make some well reasoned points to which, after I called for criticism, it’s my duty to respond.

            On the social issue front, these resent results only prove the core of the argument that I previously made. The younger generation has moved decidedly to the left on various social issues. The left has won the culture war. I tried to make that point, and election night further proved what I had been saying. Where I was wrong, however, and where many people rightly raised issue, was on the implementation front. A culture shift does not immediately translate into a political shift. The translation of what people believe into what is law takes time and effort. Most importantly, this struggle provides political energy. A part of my original point was that because the left had won the culture war, the Democratic Party could no longer gin up social issues for momentum and would have to look to other areas for supposed oppression to fuel its base. This contention, I now feel, is wrong. The Democrats will have, for the immediate future at least, the social issues card in its hand, ready to be employed at any time. I made the mistake of assuming that a victorious battle meant a victorious war. Just because the battle may have been won, that does not mean that the war is over. The current generation of Democratic activists still has the real and imaginary struggles against oppression to chew on.

            Where I was totally right, and where nobody raised issue with, was on the fiscal front. Election night didn’t change this. There is no money left and if entitlement spending is going to remain where it is, taxes are going to come up on the middle class. Note, I ignored the upper class. You can raise taxes on the rich all you like, but it’s still not enough. Obama presented a false choice, entitlements or low taxes on the rich. The American people chose the former. But just because a choice has been made does not mean that reality, that math, has been altered. Confiscate all of the wealth on the rich, and you still run up short. The long term structural deficit of the US bodes ill for the welfare state. Of course, no one wants to debate this point. Finances, economics, and deficits are boring, dismal. Gay marriage, pot legalization, and birth control are all issues that are heavily driven by emotion, with facts taking a back seat to people’s impulses and moral sentiments. This isn’t so much of an indictment of these issues, but rather is a statement as to why they predominated the election debate when our country nears the financial apocalypse.

Technology

            So what happened on election night? Democrats came out of the wood work. Did the country suddenly make a huge lurch to the left over the last five to six years? I’d argue that while the country has moved leftwards, the election results of 2008 and 2012 can be more attributed to a different story, one that I haven’t seen commonly discussed. Technology has fundamentally changed the makeup of the American electorate.

            Where the Obama campaign succeeded, and how Obama managed to win, was by brilliantly pulling in unlikely voters to the voting booths. You can read more about this here. Simply put, the Obama campaign devised a way to bring people to the polls that normally don’t go and stay home. If they just did this in 2008, you could argue that it was a fluke. To do it again in 2012, after the economy is in a terrible position, shows that they have devised something to get Latinos, blacks, and especially young voters to the polls.

            I want to focus on latter group, young voters. The old conventional wisdom about young voters was that though they leaned sharply to the left, they never voted. Youth voters were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. How did the Obama campaign manage to turn out the youth vote in huge numbers in 2008 AND 2012? Arguing that the youth became more liberal avoids the issue. The youth circa 1968 were close to being communists, but Nixon got elected. The question is not one of ideology but turnout. What changed? Technology.

To see what I mean by this, let’s take a gander at a little European country called Switzerland. The Swiss government was faced with a problem of constantly declining turnout in their elections. Making voting easier, by shifting to a mail in ballot system, did nothing to fix this. Turnout was much lower in the cities than in the small villages. Why? After some thought and research, an answer was found. The social prestige to voting drives people to vote. As Derek Thompson of the Atlantic puts it:

People like being seen voting,..., but we also like being seen having voted. Theoretically something signalling to our community that we've already voted should create the same feelings of social cohesion, civic duty, and belonging. And that's where the "I Voted" sticker comes in.

The "I Voted" sticker is a signal and an advertisement. It binds people together in solidarity and reminds others to join the group. Tens of millions of people will vote in every presidential election whether there are free stickers or free cookies. But beyond these intrinsically interested (and, possibly, more informed) voters are countless more citizens who need motivation to show up at the ballot box. 

The rise of the internet, and social media in general, has created an enormous social pressure on young people to vote. Think back to before the internet. Your contact with the outside world was limited through direct social interaction, the radio, and television. Now, you have smart phones, social networks, text messaging, internet forums, and the like to keep up the pressure to vote. If you were a 25 year old in 1980, you could feasibly get by without paying much attention to the election. Now, a quick glance at your facebook newsfeed shows the constant pressure people are under to make up their minds and vote. A generation that is always connected, always online, is a generation that will vote. The civic duty to vote has been replaced, or perhaps supplemented, by the social pressure to vote.

            My generation has been thrown into the political forum. No longer is the forum separate from the marketplace, separate from the church, separate from the bar, separate from the school. All of these formerly divided and separate public and private spaces have been amalgamated, like metal in a hot furnace, into an always loud, never ceasing, cacophonous political arena of total war and scorched earth. We can no longer ignore the forum, as technology has brought the forum into every part of our lives. There is no longer any respite from politics, except for ignorance. The youth vote, for better or for worse, is now an intractable, inseparable part of the electorate. Let us all hope that the constant noise of technology brings to us not only knowledge, but wisdom as well.