Election Obsession
Welcome to our Election debrief! Whereby Brett keeps us on topic, and I veer us down paths unknown with plenty of gleefully used profanity.
Thoughts on the Election
Emily: We went back and forth on possible topics for this blog post, and ultimately realized that the election was the most timely, relevant thing we could talk about today. Not to worry, if I have anything to do with it, we’ll weave a few other things into this blog post as well, so it won’t be a total snooze fest. I originally labeled this blog post “Election Obsession” because, well, Brett went deeper into this election than I even knew was possible. Like, DEEP. And great, right? Well, as he went deep into the election, I realized that I needed to do the opposite, for my mental health. So Brett is full of election data and I’m actively trying to avoid the topic? What could go wrong? Hahahaha. This is actually a broader theme in our relationship, where I actively create boundaries to stay sane and this keeps us on two separate islands. His island — full of normal stuff like election articles, TV shows, relevant cultural shit. My island — full of sunshine and rainbows because I’m fiercely protective of the news and media I let in, only watch reality TV shows or feel-good TV, and love a good fiction/romance novel (sensing a theme here? I’m all about uplifting brain material right now). How on Earth do we spend 24 hours a day together? Well, ahem, the chemistry is good. Anyhoo! The election! What a bitch this one has been!
Brett: I find Game of Thrones to be very uplifting.
Election News Fascination
Brett: Leading up to the election I was fascinated (which is a nicer word than “obsessed”) with updates regarding the presidential contest. I already consume a number of current events podcasts (e.g. The Daily, Today Explained, The Weeds, Slate Political Gabfest) so I’m well-steeped in politics already, but for the last several months I’ve also been a daily visitor to FiveThirtyEight for my regular fix on where the horse race stood.
Emily certainly wasn’t interested in going as deep as I was, but she’s been plugged-in to how the race has played out. Our daily walks were often dominated by the state of the race (or whatever crazy shit Trump had said that day). I try to be mindful about the limits of her interest in these topics and to change the subject when we reached that point. She’ll have to be the judge of how well I did.
Emily: I think we have both been invested in this election because of the nightmare that is Donald Trump. I was pretty excited with the field of Democratic candidates, and then pretty aghast when they whittled down to the old white dude. Again. Like, really? I understand the whys, I mean, this person had to go against Trump, but really? Thank goodness he chose Kamala as his running mate.
But yes, Brett read and listened to all of the things about this election and started to show me the FiveThirtyEight poll on a daily basis. This was our daily routine…
Brett: It’s at 88 / 10, Biden is up one
Me: STOP, don’t get me excited, I mean it! I can’t handle another 2016!
And sure enough, were the polls wrong? YES MOTHERFUCKERS THEY WERE. I pretty much stopped reading news about the election because Brett was handling it for us both. And then that became my strategy — I let him handle the worry. Does that make sense? I did the same with the Amy Coney Barrett nomination, whereby I turned to Brett and said, “I’m going to let you carry this one for us both” and then I focused on other things. This was an extremely powerful technique that allowed me to function, stay informed, without giving it all of myself. Because here’s the thing, I have given all of myself to a lot of things this year — Covid worries, BLM worries, the death of my mother, the ongoing division in this country — and it is destroying me (dramatic, much?). I knew I couldn’t take on more. So I let Brett take it — and people, it worked.
Brett: I actually avoided news about the Amy Coney Barrett nomination (relative to other news) because I found it completely deflating and the outcome inevitable. I don’t like to feel sad.
Divisions with Friends and Family
Brett: Living in the Seattle area most everyone is on the same page politically, so while I try to be careful speaking with someone where I don’t know their political leanings, after a wink and a nod we can acknowledge that we are of similar viewpoints. This is a good thing in that you can speak about the world with people knowing that they have the same base set of assumptions, but a bad thing in that I’m not often exposed to the views of the other side which comprises 48% of the country.
That having been said I do have friends and family members with differing politics because I hail from Eastern Washington. With most of them I’m just careful to talk about other things and bite my tongue when they bring up politics.
One notable exception is a childhood best friend who is a conservative but also a never-Trumper. I appreciate that we can have a constructive dialog from time to time on politics and often politely agree to disagree.
The reason why this works is that he consumes news from legitimate sources, not simply from a social media echo chamber or the right wing fringe. Unfortunately this is often not the case which is why our country has become so much more divided in recent years. When I was a kid most people got their news from one of a few highly respected sources. Now most people live in their own little media bubbles that serve to reinforce their own biases without ever challenging them. In 2020 you would never see public sentiment turn against Joseph McCarthy or Richard Nixon once the truth of their deceptions were revealed because we live in a world where anyone can create a website or social media account to convince you of “alternative facts.”
Emily: I regularly go to the Fox News site to see what they are talking about, and also because I desperately want to understand how almost half of this country voted for that fucker. I went to their website last night and there was an article written by a pastor on why God let Biden get more votes, and how he (the pastor) thought that Donald Trump had been sent by God for the Christians. This was like the 5th headline down in the center of the main Fox news page. I just. WHAT? Okay, I digress. I really wanted to speak to Brett’s point above about reading alternative points of view and media, and I do try, but sometimes it’s just wild.
What were we talking about? Divisions with friends and family. I am pretty infamous for loudly declaring that people who don’t agree with me should get out of my life and off of my Facebook page. This is not a good thing; this is me being immature. My brother and I had a very big fight after Trump got elected, and stopped being FB friends entirely. As the country got more and more polarized, so did we. I will deliberately gloss over all of the details here, but I’ll say that the person who gets the most credit for keeping my brother and me at all connected is my lovely sister-in-law Kristy. She, I’m pretty certain, is on the opposite side of the political spectrum, but she keeps it to herself, and she and I text pretty regularly. She is the person I think about when I think about how we’re all humans when you strip away our politics. If it weren’t for her, I probably would have allowed myself to get hermetically sealed into my blue bubble, permanently.
Feelings About Outcome
Brett: On the one hand the outcome of Biden and Harris’ win feels great, the end of a four-year-long nightmare. I haven’t been this excited about the presidency since 2008.
I’m still assessing how much my faith has been shaken in pollsters and the modelers at FiveThirtyEight. The polls in Wisconsin turned out to be wildly off even if the outcome ultimately came out as predicted. On the other hand Georgia was pretty close to the polling and most other states were within their margins of error.
My overall feeling about democracy has been shaken further though. The Democrats seem unlikely to take the Senate, meaning more divided and paralyzed government, even though more people voted for Democratic Senate candidates than Republican candidates. The fact that this body gives Wyoming, population 578 thousand, equal representation to California, population 39 million, is deeply unfair and undemocratic. The presidency is extremely powerful and Biden will bring many changes to this institution that I’m longing for, but his legislative agenda is dead.
But I don’t want to go out on a sad note. The last four years have been a serious threat to our country as Donald Trump’s lies, corruption and incompetence have been allowed to run roughshod over our institutions. It is heartwarming that our country rejected him by a margin of four million votes (and counting!).
In 2021 we get to turn the page to a new chapter and while that chapter won’t be all sunshine and rainbows (sorry folks, but the pandemic isn’t over) it does mark the end of one of the darkest chapters in our history.
Here is how I think of it: 2020 was Game of Thrones season 5 while 2021 will be season 6.
Emily: For the record I have never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones. I tried to watch the first episode once and there was a baby with blue eyes running in the forest and I said HELL NO and turned it off. How is that I’m living with this man when I don’t even understand the above reference?!
Re: the election, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop, if that makes sense. I’m not quite ready to move on and celebrate Biden/Harris until the lawsuits are done, and the Trumpers have driven the streets with their flags and their guns for the last time. THEN I will really breathe. Although I did watch Biden and Harris speak last night to acknowledge the win, and it made me cry.
I can’t really think about how Mitch McConnell is going to block Biden from doing all of the things right now, because that would make me want to puke. I can only hope that the fact that these two men have worked together for centuries (legit, they probably have, because they are both ancient, and there may even be some reincarnation involved) helps them to negotiate. I am really not trying to be ageist in this post, but it is scientifically proven that aging affects the brain, people. Anyhow — I’m hoping that Biden manages to save the earth, improve race relations, fix healthcare, fix our immigration issues, let the Dreamers stay, etc. Just a few things. He and Kamala can do it!
