Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“Three Lives & Company is a 650-square-foot bookshop on a corner in New York City’s West Village.” Evan Friss, The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore.

“I wonder if there isn’t a lot of bunkum in higher education?” Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels.

“On the outskirts of Nashville, tucked between open pastures and suburban cul-de-sacs, stands a museum dedicated to the memory of Andrew Jackson.” Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.

“So you have decided to commit a murder.” Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide.

“Benjamin Franklin, forty-six years old in June 1752, strode into a field just north of the burgeoning village of Philadelphia.” Richard Munson, Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist.

“Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.” Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake.

“When I was a very young man and became very successful in the movies very quickly, I harbored a notion that I had not earned my accomplishments, that I hadn’t done the requisite work, that it was all merely a fluke, that I didn’t deserve it.” Andrew McCarthy, Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain.

“As requested, they had all assembled in the Library before dinner.” Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook: A Jackson Brodie Book.

“It is predawn in Macon, Georgia, and at four o’clock, the city does not move.” Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife.

“Alice and Emma, the two ducks, sat on the bank and watched the breeze crinkle the surface of the duck pond into a sort of blue and silver carpet.” Walter R. Brooks, Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (illustrated by Kurt Wiese).

“Florie’s Papa had sent a letter.” Jon Grinspan, The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy.

“No. Nup. That wouldn’t do. It reeked of PhD. This was meant to be read by normal people.” Geraldine Brooks, Horse.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. (Thanks to Steve Newman)

“I learned of Samuel’s death two days before Christmas while standing in the doorway of my mother’s new home.” Dinaw Mengestu, Someone Like Us.

“The House of the Vampire arrived in 1907, with a pinch of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a dash of Swinburne, and a major crush on Oscar Wilde.” Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

Posted on by rjonakait

77 Million

Before the election, a post on a neighborhood social media site praised the Electoral College. That spurred me on to write about that institution on this blog. However, I also responded directly to the post saying that it would be interesting to see the reaction if a conservative presidential candidate won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. I averred further that we were unlikely to find out because the probability was low that a conservative would win the most votes. The original poster replied that he did not care about the popular vote as long as Trump won. After the election, he gloated that the “conservative” Donald Trump had won the popular vote.

I do confess that I was wrong in suggesting that Trump could not win the most votes, but it was a victory with caveats.

The news analyses shortly after the election were often about groups that had swung to Trump giving him his win. I saw stories indicating that Texas Hispanics shifted to Trump as did more voters in New York City, and that young men went for Trump at a higher rate than young women did for Harris. And so on. The implications were that Trump’s victory was a landslide demonstrating the country’s hard shift to the right.

Is that so?

Trump did win the most votes, garnering at the latest count 76.8 million votes, but it appears that he did not obtain a majority. A few more votes may trickle in, but he did not get above 50%. Harris was not far behind, with 48.3% of the vote. If the country has shifted right, the tilt is less than that of the Pisa tower. In terms of the popular vote, this was the closest election since 2000. The Electoral College may have been a landslide but the popular vote was not, and it is noteworthy that Trump won some of the swing states by tiny margins.

Trump did get 2.5 million more votes than his 2020 total of 74.2 million, but the U.S. population increased by about five million during that span, or 1.5%. Trump’s votes should have increased by 1.1 million from 2020 to 2024 merely because of population growth. He did somewhat better than that and shifts to him are outcomes worth analyzing. But there was a more significant factor.

The real difference in the election was not the collection of new Trump voters but the loss of those who did not vote for Harris. Biden in 2020 got over 81 million votes; Harris had about five million fewer. While some of Harris’s shortfall may have voted for Trump, most of them did not. Many voters, in essence, disappeared, and Trump was the beneficiary. And that, not the new Trump voters, is really the big story.

Many touted the importance of the election, so it is somewhat surprising that the turnout was less by at least a couple of percentage points, than it was four years ago. Ballotpedia.org says the turnout in 2020 was 66.6 % of eligible voters and this year it was three points less.

The fluctuating size of the electorate is a complicated American story. We may pledge allegiance to our democracy or republic, whatever your ideology dictates, but we don’t always value the vote as much as our patriotic proclamations imply. I learned from The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy (2021) by Jon Grinspan that the turnout in the 1896 presidential election was 79.3% of eligible voters. But in the early twentieth century, the percentages fell, bottoming out in 1924 at 48.8%. (Grinspan suggests several reasons for the decline. Surprisingly to me, turnout fell most in the states that had adopted the secret ballot, a late nineteenth-century innovation.)

The percentage of eligible voters who vote has changed throughout our history, and the recent drop perhaps indicates the most important conclusion from the last election: A conservative can win the popular vote if the number of voters, by hook or by crook, is lowered.