Tuesday was debate night in the US. It had the feel of a big game as people gathered together over dinner or drinks to watch and cheer. Like many Americans, I have a strong rooting interest this election, but very little ability to influence the outcome. I know dozens, probably hundreds, of Americans who watched the debate last night, but I do not know a single undecided voter who did-and I certainly do not know a single undecided voter in a swing state who watched. In fact, like many Americans, I do not know a single undecided voter in a swing state at all.
Although the media had framed this debate as being an opportunity for undecided voters to learn more about the election, and particularly Kamala Harris, the truth is that with fewer than 70 days before the election, most undecided voters are only very peripherally interested in politics and were very unlikely to watch the debate. Moreover, many of those who are identifying themselves as undecided in polls at this point in the election are unlikely to vote at all.
When many of us gathered around our televisions or computers to watch a spectacle that included mention of “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison," bizarre racist tropes about migrants eating household pets and, in general, a poor rendition of Donald Trump’s golden oldies, that is precisely what we were seeing-a spectacle. Media spin notwithstanding we were not watching something of great political significance because almost all of us are essentially spectators now.
The reason for so many Americans, across most of the country and across party lines, are relegated to spectator status can be summarized in two words-electoral college.
Criticism of the electoral college because it weighs some votes more heavily than others is reasonably widespread and understood. Similarly, defenses of the electoral college, which boil down to the idea the fields in Wyoming should have more representation than people in big coastal cities is also reasonably well understood. However, it is often overlooked that the electoral college makes it more difficult for American to participate meaningfully in elections and therefore undermines support for democracy.
My intention here is not to write a critique of the electoral college. At this point, anybody who continues to defend that anachronism is generally a partisan Republican who wants to preserve an electoral advantage at the expense of democracy-sometimes supplementing this view by the right-wing talking point that “this is a republic not a democracy.”
Rather, in an era when American democracy is in the throes of a crisis brought about in part by a political party that has been captured by forces that include what could charitably be described as substantial white nationalist and fascist influences, the other weaknesses of our democracy become more significant.
Turning American voters into spectators contributes to the disenchantment with the processes and institutions, shared, albeit for different reasons, by people across the partisan and ideological divides. There is something surreal about watching a debate, party convention or just the latest political news and asking not “how does this make me and my friends feel about the candidates,” but instead trying to figure out what an imaginary undecided voter in a swing state might think. This removes us from the urgency and immediacy of the process and turns it into some kind of abstract guessing game.
This abstraction belies the extraordinary import of this, and pretty much every, election. Those of us who live in New York, California, Oklahoma, Tennessee or numerous other states where the election has not been competitive in several cycles still have a great deal at stake in the outcome, so we follow the long campaign season with the same focus and intensity some of us bring to following, for example, the long baseball season.
We agonize or celebrate things like a winning streak in September, a big trade in July, a convention that goes well, a bad debate, an injury to a key player, a clutch home run or great television interview, but we have as much ability to directly influence the election as we do to hit a big home run for our team.
There are things we can do, like send money, but for most of us that money is a tiny drop in a much larger bucket. We can also spend our own money to go to a swing state and knock on doors or phone bank from afar, but the impact of those kinds of activities is not quite what we are led to believe. Swing voters in Michigan may not cotton to coastal elites telling them to vote for Harris or angry conspiracy mongering fanatics from other states urging them to support Trump.
The debate was, I suppose, good television but a media that remains obsessed with horserace coverage has overstated its relevance in this campaign. Twenty-four hours after the debate the huge majority of American who do not live in swing states, now go back to our corners and hope our team can get those final outs, score a game-winning touchdown or whatever metaphor you prefer-and recognize that as long as the electoral college is around, we will remain, in a very real way, on the sidelines.
The electoral college and the senate are two very undemocratic institutions, and no doubt the electoral college at least should be abolished.