To know and not to know
Understanding an election requires stories. Last night, our stories proved inadequate.
Last night was an hours-long national wake for our collective illusions. If the shock of Donald Trump’s victory in this year’s election accomplishes nothing else, it has put an end to some of the just-so stories we’ve heard and told about our country and its politics. Even the most severely analytical number-crunchers need stories and assumptions for their work, and it turned out that they were wrong—all of them, even the people conducting Trump’s own internal polls. The electorate they had so carefully and rigorously modeled turned out not to exist.
But this is no less true of the narratives that almost all observers have embraced. The astonishing polarization of the electorate has been explained, over a long time but increasingly in the Obama years, in terms of what now seem to be hopeless projections of any commentator’s own priorities.
Democrats were accused by conservative writers of alienating rural and evangelical voters by their embrace of increasingly uniform and uncompromising positions on abortion and their inversion of culture-war wedge issues. However fair the accusation, it can hardly explain how conservative Christians turned out in record numbers for a candidate whose opposition to legal abortion was late and embarrassingly pro-forma, and whose personal and public life appears to be nearly perfectly amoral.
