This week would be a good one to stop consuming a lot of media.
Like many, I was glued to the internet and TV on Tuesday night to watch the results of the U.S. presidential election. I watched as states that were expected to be easily blue took a while to call, and swing states all turned red. I knew of the effect of the “red mirage” where ballots from larger cities or from mail-ins took longer to count, leaving open the possibility that the races would get closer. But then that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen enough, and eventually the math got to the point where, one after another, those critical states were called and the result of the election could be declared.
Once the suspense was over, I stopped watching TV. On social media, particularly platforms like TikTok, I first saw a lot of videos of people being shocked, or sad, or angry, or happy. Then I started seeing people offering their analysis of why Kamala Harris lost the election.
She wasn’t aggressive enough against the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. She didn’t do enough to court Jewish voters. She was too tied to the Biden administration. She didn’t spend enough time defending the Biden administration. She was too far to the left, alienating centrist voters. She was too centrist, alienating her base. She wasn’t a good communicator. She focused too much on abortion. Blah, blah, blah. All sorts of theories, very little evidence behind them other than gut feelings.
About the only thing everyone seemed to agree on is that she and her campaign failed. It doesn’t matter if she got 47.5% of votes when the other guy got 50.8% of votes.
In a sense, of course, they’re right. He won. She lost. But what bothers me is that we’re focused on 130,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 80,000 in Michigan and 30,000 in Wisconsin, instead of asking questions about the other 150 million or so votes. We’ve become so consumed by the horse race mentality that we ignore the big picture.
On the day after the election, one common sentiment I saw from people I don’t know is that yes, it is perfectly acceptable to paint more than 70 million Americans as racist, sexist, transphobic, horrible people for voting the way they did. It is perfectly acceptable to hate those people.
And in a free country, you are allowed to dislike people for their political views. You can dismiss them or ignore them or call them names.
But you’re not going to change anyone’s mind by hating them. And you’re not going to win elections if you can’t change minds. And you’re not going to change the world if you can’t win elections.