The Election

It simultaneously feels as though the election already happened and is a million years away, but apparently, it's actually happening next week.

Politics have been a critical part of the way Waypoint and Remap have always thought about video games. It was a building block for the way we thought about building both publications, born out of frustration from working at other publications where it was downplayed.

In this case, we're talking about the impending election, and how Rob and Patrick have been feeling leading up to voting day. At least, after next week, maybe those fucking transphobic ads on sports will go away?

Patrick: Jesus, take the wheel. 

That’s my feeling, anyway, as I write this exactly two weeks before the next election. I don’t say that out of despair but exhaustion. It feels like the election was decided sometime in the later summer—and now we’re just waiting. In previous election cycles, I’d spend too many days digging through election threads in the “off topic” sections of boards I frequent, and find myself nodding and mmm hmm-ing as someone begins to explain the crosstabs in a new election poll, trying to find reasons to handwave away some new numbers that came in and causing despair.

That’s no way to live. On a podcast a few months back, I asked if anyone had recommendations for a low stakes political podcast to listen to as the election neared. Nothing fit! And I’m grateful.

I think you have a few options in advance of a presidential election. You can spend your time and energy elsewhere, knowing most of it is out of your hands and prioritizing your own mental health. I think that’s reasonable. In fact, more people should. You can try and practice restraint, dipping in and out of the daily news about the ebbs and flows of the election, seeking a tiny hit of copium. (This is what I’ve been trying, and sometimes failing, to practice. Dipping in once leads to dipping in twice, and suddenly you’ve lost the better part of an hour learning nothing.) 

Or you can be like my friend’s wife? Who was fed up with living in a solid blue state and sending money to Act Blue and flew to Wisconsin to volunteer at a rural election headquarters? She had planned to stay for a week or two, then became so integral to the operation that she’s staying all the way through the election. Fuckin’ a, regardless of how the election goes, that is awfully cool.

The area I moved to had started drifting purple around the time we moved in. 2016 happened, spurring the area blue. I actually signed up to knock on doors for our local congressional candidate. Because I worked from home, I was able to attend a local event in the middle of the day a few weeks before the 2020 election. It was like throwing red meat to a pack of wolves, because everyone else was old. Even the candidate came up to say hello. Admittedly, the attention did prompt me to agree to knock on doors for a few afternoons, including a handful of neighborhoods in deeply red areas. (We live not far from some really wealthy, aka red, areas.)

For one of my college journalism courses, we had to stand outside of a local event—concert, talk, whatever—and interview people in line about what was happening. I find those kinds of social interactions to be the most terrifying. I can’t explain why. It’s similar to the way I get weirded out talking on the phone. I can’t explain it! But knocking on random doors brought the same kind of raw fear. None of the interactions were hostile. Most people took a pamphlet from me they probably quickly threw away, or declined talking with me and then quietly shut the door.

In my head, I’d prepared some talking points…but never got much past “hello, goodbye.”

A few weeks later, that candidate did win! And then Illinois did a bunch of redistricting the next cycle and he was no longer my congressperson. Terrific. Look, I didn’t feel like I moved any needles while knocking, but I’ll admit—it felt fucking cool to brag to folks that I’d participated?

Nothing like that this cycle. I’ve donated some money. I’ve despaired a bit in private. 

Where’s your head at, Rob? 

Rob: I keep writing and rewriting different attempts at an answer because I’m honestly not sure myself. I am less involved with this election than any other in my lifetime, and I veer between thinking that’s actually a healthy and rational place to end up versus evidence of the onset of mid-life complacency and indifference. So maybe I am trying to rationalize, and fool myself that it’s the former and not the latter, but here’s where I’m at.

We talked about this before, but 2016 broke my relationship with election reporting and coverage. I was following the pools closely, listening to every episode of Keeping It 1600 (the precursor to Pod Save America), various other political shows, reading tons of articles from the campaign trail… and still I was unprepared for what happened on election night. I realized I’d consumed a lot of that media looking for comfort and reassurance, and along the way I’d ingested a lot of liberal complacency. But more importantly, I learned that none of that horse-race reporting is predictive of an outcome, not really. Polls are not scores at the end of an inning in a baseball game.

I think my relationship with political reporting in general has continued to erode to this day. It’s been pretty clear for a while that the “liberal media” was in the tank for Republicans. Part of it is that the right has worked the refs successfully for 30 years. You can go back to The War Room, the documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, where James Carville starts ranting about the fact that the famously wonky, detail-obsessed Clinton could give these completely measured descriptions of the issues and his policy solutions and the Bush campaign could reply with a smoke cloud of bullshit, and the media would both-sides the exchange into irrelevance. Things have changed since then: they’ve gotten significantly worse.

The problem comes down to this: sometimes reality provides definitive answers about questions of policy and capability and in my lifetime we have received clear, brutal verdicts on whether Republicans are capable of governance, and whether their policy preferences translate to greater health and comfort for a majority of people. George W. Bush couldn’t manage the national security state and 9/11 happened within a year of his taking office. His administration couldn’t craft and execute a military strategy because reality was inconvenient to their objectives, so the United State perpetrated violent, tragic farces in Afghanistan and Iraq. New Orleans was devastated by natural disaster and basically abandoned, and right before he left the economy collapsed.

In a similar fashion, it was pretty clear through a lot of the Trump administration that his real interest was in corruption and tax cuts, and everything else was left to the ideologues that surrounded him. But by the end, we had a devastating pandemic he had publicly downplayed and tried to ignore. There are empty seats around the family table this holiday season that would be filled if he had never been elected president. 

And then when the country tried to correct that mistake in 2020, he attempted to overthrow the government.

I am not saying that Democrats, liberal or centrist, have the best approach to tackling these issues. But against this track record it kind of doesn’t matter whether you’re getting someone who governs like Joe Manchin or like Elizabeth Warren. Republican governance brings disaster: moral, physical, economic.

But our elections are pointedly divorced from any kind of historical context. There are two parties, they must be treated as equally viable and credible options, and there is no body of work that we can check their plans and rhetoric against. The opinion pages and TV commentary panels must equally represent both sides, regardless of what they have said or whether they are capable of making a good-faith argument. Is it really surprising our elections are so close, given every election season involves an elaborate Truman Show construction around the Republican party presenting them as viable public servants with a valid philosophical approach to governance that places them in principled opposition to Democrats?

So that’s why I’ve kind of checked-out of election news. I don’t know what is going to happen with this election, but I don’t think following it more closely is going to give me greater insight. It’ll just expose me more to the false premises of mainstream political reporting. In the meantime, there’s also no doubt about my own judgment about what I have to do: I am voting for Kamala Harris and any other Democrat on the ballot. I wish there had been a primary where we could have had another battle for the direction of the party and the administration, but we didn’t. And the choice is between an embarrassing group of evil fuckups led by a guy who is, without a shred of exaggeration, a failed president in addition to being a corrupt failson rapist… and Kamala Harris and some other Democrats? I don’t need to read past the cover. I just need to vote and then we’ll deal with whatever reality we find ourselves in after the election.

Patrick: We’re in similar places, media-wise. It made me feel involved, participatory even! I was listening to smart people providing smart insights about politics. And then it all fell apart. On the night Trump won, my wife went to bed with a few states in the balance, but it had not sunk in that he might actually win. I remember shuffling into bed sometime after midnight, with my wife opening her eyes briefly to ask if everything turned out okay. I thought about deception, but I was in such shock that I couldn’t muster a white lie. Her eyes bulged and then…she went back to sleep. I’m not sure she processed what happened. She barely remembers me telling her, except she woke up with an emotional hangover instead of my physical hangover the next day.