First impressions and truth

In a post-election post last week,  I had mentioned that, nationally, the outcome appeared to be a bit of a draw, with Democrats retaking the House, and Republicans gaining some ground in the Senate.  I wrote that the results indicated that President Trump had neither been repudiated nor confirmed by the country.  In writing that, I was attempting to summarize and interpret the gist of what I had gleaned from news reports and commentary I had consumed in the day or so after the election.

In a post at National Review's The Corner blog, Yuval Levin makes an important point: what we were given in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's vote consisted of 'insta-analysis': conclusions based on what was known, visible and reported at that time.

But in fact, a few hours after the polling places close, there is much that is not yet definitively concluded.  Tom has posted about continuing efforts in Florida to discern just what happened in this election.  Some races in Florida and other states are too close to call, either because the votes are very close and recounts may be necessary, or because the tabulation of votes doesn't happen instantly.  In the western United States, mail-in ballots are more common than they are in the east, and those ballots take days to process.  In some cases, it seems that mail-in ballots may continue to be received and counted beyond the designated election day.  And it seems that there is a blizzard of those mail-ins that come in on election day, and it takes election judges and officials time - sometimes a week or more - to dig out.

So it is that now, at the distance of nearly a week after Election Day, it's becoming increasingly clear that the insta-analysis from last Tuesday evening didn't paint a completely accurate picture.  Here is Levin:

The impression created by media coverage early on the night of the election was that what might have been a meaningful Democratic wave had turned out to be barely a ripple. The Democrats looked likely to take over the House by just a tiny margin, perhaps barely flipping the 23 seats they would need, or at best reaching 30. In the Senate,  ... [i]t seemed at first as though Republicans might net four or five seats, which would be a serious gain.  In an op-ed I wrote for the Washington Post the morning after the election, I pointed to the results to highlight the inability of either party to reach beyond its comfort zone and wrote that, “in the House, the Democrats had an opportunity for major gains throughout the country, but they made modest gains in friendly suburbs — winning almost exclusively districts that Hillary Clinton won two years ago.” ... I would not now describe that success as “modest.” This was a robust victory for them ... They look to have won closer to 40 House seats (almost certainly their biggest House victory in a midterm election since the Watergate era) and to have kept Republicans down to one or two Senate seats despite those 10 Democratic seats up for election in Trump-friendly states. It was the Republicans who largely failed to seize an opportunity.

So as numbers have solidified, the storyline has changed - or it should have changed: last Tuesday actually was a very good night for Democrats.  It seems legitimate now to talk of a Blue Wave.  The difference between Democrats in the House picking up 30 seats and 40 seats may be the difference between Nancy Pelosi (or whoever Democrats choose as Speaker) having a tentative and unreliable majority and a solid majority.   And the Senate may not gain as many Republicans as first thought; as the mail-in ballots continue to get counted in Arizona it's looking more likely that the Democrat, Sinema, will win, and only heaven, and probably eventually the courts, will know how Florida's Senate race turns out.  Overall, it seems more accurate today to describe the outcome of the elections as a straightforward repudiation of Donald Trump than had been the case in the hours after the polls closed.


But Levin questions whether the public's awareness of the emerging truth has stuck, or would ever stick.  He points out that once a first impression has been made, it's difficult for most of us to undo it.  He analyzes some of the ways this happens with elections, pointing in particular to Twitter:

Because media elites tend to follow one another on Twitter, vague impressions of a changing event quickly get spun up into something everybody’s saying. They then become congealed into trusted judgments and swiftly harden into conventional wisdom and so come to be treated as something everybody knows. Pretty soon (and I mean often within minutes) political and media elites are responding en masse to a slapdash interpretation of events as if it were a set of facts. The speed and strength of this setting of judgments can be especially astonishing if you’re not yourself immersed in Twitter and so observe the results of the process without quite feeling the pressures that yield them. 

On election night, such judgments are quickly stated on television as near-facts, since everybody on the network sets is always glued to Twitter. And that repetition only tends to feed back into the spiral, now with the supposed authority of a traditional news organization, so the whole cycle repeats. All this speeds up the process by which people come to believe they understand what they are witnessing, and the resulting confidence can be very hard for later revelations to unravel. The dynamic is more like gossip than analysis.

There was a time, and it really wasn't that long ago, when people waited at least until the newspaper arrived on their doorstep the following morning to understand election results.  Ballots were counted by hand, and the process would go late into the evening and early morning, when people who worked or went to school already were in bed.  That dynamic began to change 20 or so years ago, with the advent of electronic ballots: results could be calculated as quickly as electronic numbers could be collected from precinct voting machines.  As with so many aspects of our lives, technology not only fed our appetite for instant gratification, but set our expectations for it.

But now there are forces at work in our culture that work against that instant gratification.  Mail-in ballots are, in many ways, a return to the old days of how election results were tabulated.  Here is Levin quoting an official in Arizona:

One of the major reasons it takes time to count ballots is that there are hundreds of thousands of early ballots dropped off at the polls on election day – approximately 320,000 statewide this time. The counties are currently working to verify the signatures on each and every one of those early ballots before they can be tabulated. Once the county election officials verify the signature on each of those ballots (which is no small task!), they then make sure that a voter didn’t cast an early ballot AND vote in person at a polling location. All of these processes take a little bit of time and is done to ensure that voters can trust the outcome of their elections.

Why are mail-in ballots so popular?  I don't know; I don't think they're very common where I live.  Perhaps some of you have insight.  I speculate that some of it comes down to trust: while voters' right to leave work in order to vote on election day is legally protected, people may not trust their employer to observe that law, and individuals may feel they are powerless to stand up to an employer who would discipline or fire them for exercising their citizen rights.  Or perhaps there are other reasons that mail-in voting is so popular.

But whatever the dynamics, I agree with Levin that we need to resist the temptation to leap to instant conclusions regarding elections: both the results and what the results mean for purposes of both governing and politics may not be apparent for days or even weeks after an election.