How AJ+ Approached Election 2020
![Voters in San Diego drop off their ballots on Election Day [Mike Blake/Reuters]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f21dbb91adde3260d4ba1ef/1604431200211-8P44II3PI0GYFKQ6U1AJ/voting-election-day)
Voters in San Diego drop off their ballots on Election Day [Mike Blake/Reuters]
By Tony Karon
You know that cliche about journalists writing the first draft of history?
Well, that’s the challenge before us in this frightening historical moment, whose turbulence is coming to a head in Election 2020. The questions of how America is governed, and by and for whom, have reached a point of crisis from which there is no easy exit, and no simple resolution.
A political system whose institutions don’t ensure government with the consent of the governed – the very basis of democracy – is unable to contain the increasingly fraught struggle between the majority of citizens and those in power.
It would be naive and presumptuous, though, to imagine we’re actually writing the first draft, because the crisis unfolding in and around this election is simply a new inflection point in the unspooling of a longer history.
Today’s Republican Party doubling down on a system of white minority rule by doing whatever they can to stop BIPOC citizens from voting, or having their votes counted, or having their votes matter, is the latest episode in a centuries-old struggle over power in the USA that dates back to its founding as a political system ruled by and for a handful of rich white men.
Those rich white men – the Founders – feared “excessive democracy,” because that would threaten their power and privilege. That fear of allowing the citizenry to choose their government is echoed in the voter suppression effort at the heart of the GOP’s strategy for staying in power. But the fact that millions of new voters cast ballots for the first time this year, often against considerable odds, underscores the expectation of the governed to choose the government.
Something will have to give.
American history shows that it is the epic struggles over decades and even centuries of those excluded from power that have forced the rulers to gradually cede the right to vote – first to white men who owned no property, then to white women, then to Black people. But U.S. democracy remains incomplete: The Founders installed constitutional brakes to limit democracy – the Electoral College, which allows the loser of the election to be the winner, and a Senate in which each vote in Wyoming is worth the equivalent of 68 votes in California because of its two-senators-per-state structure – function to ensure white minority rule.
Intense struggles of the past 150 years have produced both significant progress towards a more inclusive, equal and democratic society, and also periods of intense backlash and reversals. The huge gains for Black Americans represented by the post-Civil War Reconstruction period were significantly reversed by white racist terror, lynching and Jim Crow. The post-World War 2 civil rights gains that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights and Immigration and Nationality acts of 1965 reversed some of what the Klan and its allies had achieved after Reconstruction; today’s Republican strategy effectively seeks to roll back the gains of 1965. As many as 25 million Americans took to the streets last summer protesting racist police violence, though with no satisfactory result.
AJ+ election coverage follows from our basic editorial identity: a social-justice perspective that means we amplify the voices of the marginalized, note systemic oppressions, and question the narratives of power. And it connects what we’ve seen in the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter rebellion and the slow-moving collapse of the economy for tens of millions of Americans – all shaped by inequalities of power.
Republican leaders have long recognized that they can’t rely on winning a majority of votes in an increasingly diverse electorate. Instead, they’ve adopted a form of regime that doesn’t depend on winning the majority of votes. The GOP has engaged in a long-term form of state capture – perfectly legal under a less-than-democratic constitutional structure – using control of state houses and courthouses to determine which citizens will get to vote and which will be denied that right, which votes will be counted, and (via gerrymandering) how much they’ll count. And previous election cycles have shown they can be pretty shameless about wielding that power to thwart democracy.
Republican officials acting aggressively to prevent BIPOC Americans from voting is not an aberration; it’s been a central feature of their strategy since long before President Trump. But the President has taken it up a notch by gaslighting the election itself, mobilizing armed loyalist thugs and state- and local-level operatives around a narrative that any defeat he suffers can only be a result of cheating.
Such lies – and we don’t hesitate to call them out – are extremely dangerous in a country that has allowed citizens to amass combat weapons, and where those who stockpile them believe brandishing them is a legitimate form of political dissent. It would be quite surprising, frankly, if the election period passed without violence, as sober analysts of international crises have warned.
The U.S. political system has reached a point of crisis from which it can’t easily snap back, regardless of the outcome of this election. There’s no ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead moment on the horizon, though the outcome of the election will likely have a profound impact in shaping the struggles to come.
At AJ+, we cover the political system from the perspective of those outside of the corridors of power, focusing on the grassroots rather than on the political establishments of either party, and on the efforts of marginalized communities to make their voices heard and votes count in a political system stacked against them. And on the systemic nature of the obstacles they face.
Focus on the Popular Vote
We’re not a traditional news service, so we’ll leave it to the mainstream outlets to focus on which way the Electoral College will go. Of course we’ll note it, but we’ll always remind our audience of the electorate’s verdict in the most important vote — the popular vote. That’s the one that tells us what the majority of the electorate wants, the one that would settle the election in a democracy. We shouldn’t treat it as natural in a democracy for a candidate who finishes second among the voters to win the election.
If this was any other country, we’d want our audience to understand how a candidate can lose by 5 million votes or more and still win the presidency. The social-justice movements that have millions of ordinary Americans protesting structural racism this year will, in the wake of this election – and regardless of its outcome – be focused intensely on the struggle to make America more democratic by seeking reforms to challenge the structures of the Electoral College, the Senate and the Supreme Court, all of which function to subvert the will of the majority of citizens.
We’ll focus on the efforts of ordinary people to make their voices heard and their votes count, and the efforts of those in power to stop people voting or the counting of their votes, mindful of the fact that those efforts form part of a deliberate strategy for holding power without the consent of the governed. This focus will become more important in the coming weeks if, as is widely predicted, those in power use all the mechanisms at their disposal to subvert the verdict of the majority of citizens.
If right-wing gunmen show up at polling stations or escalate some of the disruptive efforts we’ve seen in recent days, we’ll not neglect to note Trump’s role in fomenting such chaos. If and when the Supreme Court hands down a ruling supporting voter suppression or any other denial of democracy by the Trump administration, our audience will know that the Supreme Court is not some neutral body above the political fray; its partisan nature made clear by the fact that its current majority has been shaped by a president who lost the popular vote and a Senate that doesn’t represent the majority of the electorate.
The Crisis and the Future
It’s no longer possible for even the most wishful-thinking establishment liberals to imagine U.S. democracy as a fair, just or even stable system – as Cornel West noted recently, the lynching of George Floyd “pulled the cover off who we really are.”
The crude, racist and authoritarian tendencies of the Trump era, the naked appeals to white nationalism and mobilization of its armed acolytes with apocalyptic warnings about the consequences of anyone but Trump being elected president, are not an aberration; they’re the logical conclusion of a Republican strategy that long preceded the current presidency. Trump supporters have been convinced by the president and his media simulacrum that a Biden win would literally place them in mortal physical danger from rampaging mobs; cynical as that fearmongering may have been, it can’t be turned off with the flick of a switch.
While the election can’t resolve the historical crisis into which America has lurched over the past two decades, it will set the terms of the next phase of the struggle for – and against – democracy, equality and inclusion in America. That struggle remains our long-term focus. As turbulent and confusing as the events of the coming days and weeks could prove to be, we’ll be helping our audience make sense of the history they’re living, and showing how ordinary citizens are stepping up to claim their rights. That, as ever, is a challenge we’re here for.