Election Analysis: Ask the Right Questions
I had an easy opportunity to show off my professional skills putting together the pieces of a puzzle and framing the proper questions. I blew it.
Let’s talk about the election.
I blew it. Yes, lots of people blew it for lots of reasons, but I missed a great opportunity to show off one of my greatest strengths. Instead, I fell into the same trap as everyone else.
I pride myself on my ability to put together the disparate pieces of a problem to see the whole. In fact, that’s how I make my living (believe it or not, writing a Substack and passing the hat for contributions pays few of my bills). Speaking of which:
I’ve got a consulting practice that’s often hard to define because what I really am is a strategic troubleshooter. I’ve got a broad and deep background in problem-solving methodologies. Over the years, I’ve studied Computer Science, AI, probability & statistics, law, economics, cognitive psychology, Management Science, Talmudic exegesis, and a few other disciplines. In each of these disciplines, I’ve focused on the methodologies for identifying and solving problems. Together, they’ve led me to a few critical beliefs about the entire world of consulting, coaching, advising, ideating, or whatever other trendy words you might want to use:
Any outsider retained to offer advice arrives knowing less than anyone already in the room. Even at the personal level, who knows more about your life: You or your shrink? Yet, these well-informed clients are eager to pay a less-informed outsider for advice. Why? Well, either the client is incompetent or the client has tried everything reasonable, come up short, and feels stuck. I approach all assignments assuming the latter. Why should informed, competent people be at a loss? The most likely explanation is that they’re asking the wrong questions.
That’s why I emphasize question framing in nearly all of my professional engagements—and why I’ve adopted “Ask the Right Questions” as one of my taglines. In a time-allocation formulation I first handed my graduate students over thirty years ago, I thus spend 49% of my time formulating the right questions, 2% of my time answering those questions (because if the questions are right the answers are typically obvious), and the remaining 49% of my time convincing others that the obvious answers are correct (because everyone is reluctant to admit that they missed the obvious).
So that’s how I pay my bills. I employ this methodology to devise organizational strategies, to analyze complex matters in litigation, and on occasion even to helping individual. (If you need any services in this broad category, please drop me a line).
I also try to employ this methodology in presenting my analyses of politics, policy, philosophy, and society—basically, why you’re here (assuming that you are).
When it comes to the 2022 midterms, I performed poorly. Here’s what such an analysis should have entailed.
I should have started with two points I’ve made multiple times and in multiple places—meaning that I had no excuse for omitting it from consideration. First, the United States today is not a constitutional federal democratic republic. Second, our electoral processes lack all credibility.
I know that many people don’t want to admit it, but the idea that our republic has fallen is hardly a fringe claim. Much of the left believes that the U.S. was never anything other than an exercise in exploitation. Parts of the right believe that the New Deal and Great Society inflicted irreparable harm on the constitutional structure. Personally, I believed that the 2012 election—in which a weaponized bureaucracy placed a thumb on the scale as voters ratified the radicalism at the heart of Obama’s promised transformation—marked a dangerous turning point. Some people like to point to the Patriot Act or some other piece of legislation that undermined core protections. Plenty of other theories abound.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t much matter (at least for present purposes) when the U.S. stopped being a constitutional federal democratic republic. The country’s foundational principles had eroded so badly by early 2020 that few felt compelled to continue with the charade.
On March 13, 2020 President Trump declared a national emergency. Based on what? Fears that a new, highly contagious, uniquely dangerous virus might spread throughout the country, kill millions of Americans, and overwhelm our health care systems. Mind you, none of those things were happening on March 13, but many people—likely a supermajority of Americans—were afraid that they might. Based on that fear, the federal government, nearly all states, and plenty of municipalities claimed the authority to suspend the Bill of Rights—temporarily, of course.
Ironically, Trump’s behavior in March 2020 should have been a gift to the Democrats—and it would have been, if they had a shred of credibility. They’d spent years screaming that Trump was a unique authoritarian threat—and here he’d ushered in the most authoritarian stretch in American history. For the first time since the American founding our governments forced widespread business closures, confined people to their homes, policed assembly, prohibited communal worship, shuttered schools and playgrounds and restricted communications. It should have been a layup for the opposition party. Instead, the Democrats uniformly complained that the Trump administration was insufficiently authoritarian. They also wanted people be gagged in public and subject to medical experimentation!
America since 2020 has not been a society even pretending to be free. Rights are no longer natural or inherent; government metes them out as necessary. Neither political party nor any leading politician has called for full accountability or insisted that this entire approach is antithetical to our constitutional structure. Instead, even those who recognize the past three years as abysmal policy seem prepared to accept the precedent it sets: Widespread fears legitimate emergency declarations and the suspension of rights. Given the widespread fears of climate change, systemic racism, and other potential threats, Americans now enjoy rights and freedoms at the dispensation of the government, not as inherent gifts from God.
Okay, fine. So we’re not a constitutional federal democratic republic. What does that have to do with the midterms?
I’m getting to that. Remember, we’re focused on problem formulation.
Let’s try again: If we’re not a constitutional federal democratic republic, what are we?
Personally, I’ve been describing the U.S. as an elitist oligarchy. If you told me we were a totalitarian bureaucracy, I wouldn’t quibble. At the end of the day, it doesn’t much matter. We are a society and a country with a process for dealing with succession.
Every society has succession rules. The UK alone recently gave us two wonderful examples: On the royal side, Charles succeeded Elizabeth through primogeniture. On the parliamentary side, Sunak succeeded Truss through backroom dealing. Both are tried-and-true systems for succession. Other societies may use different rules. Wakanda, for example, seems to favor individual combat. Constitutional democratic republics hold free and fair elections attempting to discern the opinion of the citizenry. Federal systems balance the preferences of the citizenry against the preference of the constituent republics.
We don’t do any of those things. Some may claim we do, and perhaps we used to fall within those categories, but we very clearly don’t. We have a complicated system that unfolds over the course of weeks (or even months), beginning well before the officially designated “election day” and extending for a considerable period afterward. President Biden and a compliant press assured us that delays are normal and expected because they are indeed a normal and expected part of this complex process.
Our system involves ballot preprinting and harvesting, lax rules for collection and handling, minimal if any voter verification efforts, machines of unverified quality and integrity, and partisan tabulations. It includes media manipulation, bald lies told to low-information voters, scare tactics, and fearmongering. The basic goal seems to be to flood the system with low-quality ballots sufficient to overwhelm any reasonably close expression of informed citizen opinion. It’s not the bloodiest succession system anyone has ever devised, but it’s not the cleanest either.
So: Why did the GOP underperform expectations in the midterms?
Because far too many Republicans (like me) behaved as if we still live in a constitutional federal democratic republic that holds free and fair elections to discern the will of the citizenry. Democrats operated within the world as it is and the succession system that we have. As divorced from reality as parts of the Woke agenda may be, the Democrats understand the realities of the modern American succession system.
The truly astounding thing is how close the results were anyway. Republicans entered with all of the issues and a superior set of candidates (not to say there were no clunkers, but overall GOP candidate quality was far better than that of the Democrats). The Dems had an effective ground game rooted in reality.
It really is that simple.
If the GOP wants to win in the future, it needs to accommodate itself to the world as it is. Granted, the Dems do have a built-in advantage in a partisan press and compliant courts. Republicans have tried to preserve the old system where they’re still in charge—and produced results consistent with GOP dominance of all important issues. That’s fine—for those places. But where Democrats have put the new succession system in place, the GOP must invest heavily in mimicking the Dem’s ground game. It’s well suited to the times and it’s demonstrably effective. It's now worked clearly in California in 2018, nationwide in 2020, and in more than a handful of jurisdictions this year.
Can the GOP ever truly hope to beat the Democrats at their own game? Perhaps. Every now and then David does beat Goliath. Perhaps if they ever do, the Republican government they bring in will effect the critical and fundamental reforms we need to restore our constitutional federal democratic republic. Electoral reform is a start, but there’s so much more work to do!
Until that happens though, let’s all stop pretending we live in a free society that holds free and fair elections. Our lack of realism is killing us. The GOP needs to learn to play the game as it is, not as is should be.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at https://coalition4america.com/.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.