Election Day, Part I -- The Pigeon Paradigm

From a Skinner box, circa 1950

Hello. This is a short, preliminary Gene Pool on Election Day. The real action begins at 8 p.m. when I return, and you return, and we start watching the returns together, while, as my Grandma Bessie used to say, “shvitzing like a chazer.” Sweating like a pig.

I will not urge you to calm down. That would be hypocritical because I cannot calm down. I don’t think it is overstatement to say that November 5th, 2024 is going to be one of the most consequential days in American history. And even among those few other dramatic days, I believe today stands out for being the one in which the general public knew the date in advance, and the full, fiery stakes, and had a long time to think and fret and reach a panic fever. We didn’t with 9/11, with D-Day, with Pearl Harbor, with the stock market crash, with Fort Sumter. Neither Election Day 2016 nor 2020 had this full component of existential dread, because on neither day had Donald Trump yet revealed the enormity of his planned malevolence, his capacity for wanton destruction, and the breadth of his rancid, promiscuous hatreds and prejudices — nor was it so obvious that he is physically and mentally decaying before our eyes.

(By the way, yesterday he called Kamala Harris a “bitch” and said he would appoint the mentally enfeebled Herschel Walker to head a missile defense shield program. Also, he said he likes RFK Jr.’s idea about removing fluoride from drinking water. )

So. I have not said this before, but I think Harris wins this thing, and not by a whisker. I have a theory why. It is not scientific. It is not empirical. Nate Silver would rightfully disdain it. It, um, involves application of an ontological substratum of metaphysics. I am serious about it, though.

In college I was a psych major, and not a very good one, but the one time I expressed this theory out of the blue, the professor blinked and said, his fingers steepled primly in that annoying academic way, “You know, you could write a thesis on this.” He was a Skinnerian, an old-fashioned, enthusiastic proponent of “operant conditioning,” which was based on the assumption that you could modify behavior by delivering either rewards (say, food) or unpleasant stimuli (say, electric shock). Like B.F. Skinner, my professor experimented with pigeons in boxes with buttons to peck. The experiments established that the second stimulus, avoidance of pain and punishment, often proved to be a stronger influence on behavior than the deliverance of rewards.

My breakout theory was that more than any other single factor, people’s personalities and actions are subconsciously shaped in opposition to, and denial of, their most elemental, primitive anxieties. They are trying to quiet those demons. The contours of that pulsing nugget of terror at our center differ from person to person, which is why we have different personalities and proclivities.

I theorized that a physically abusive husband is someone terrified by the knowledge that he has no control over his life. The bootstraps billionaire is terrified of starving. I actually recognized this sort of thing in myself. As a young child I was paralyzingly shy to the point of dysfunction. I cried in elementary school through second grade because I was so terrified of interaction with others. So naturally I wound up becoming a journalist, a career that compels you to be a nosy, noisy, prying opinionated buttinsky and to talk fearlessly and aggressively to everybody because you have to.

I have been interacting with readers for most of my adult life, and I have never before seen people gripped by this kind of fear over an election. It is overwhelming almost everyone I know, in person or online, literally all of whom are ardent Trump opponents. Some are either not eating or overeating. Some are either not sleeping or oversleeping. Some are drinking too much.

So, here’s what I’m getting at.

Polls are showing that Harris is demonstrating a statistically significant lead over Trump in one metric: their supporters’ “enthusiasm.” Enthusiasm is a standard polling measurement but in this case, I think it is somewhat of a misnomer. I think it is only partly avid support for Harris, but much more the abject fear of the alternative.

Despite Trump’s efforts to inflame his supporters with fear of a Harris presidency (World War III !) I don’t think he has done so. They know his shtick; they see him as a performer, a comedian. They don’t take him literally. No poll will capture that directly, but I doubt that most of them believe that a Harris presidency would be dangerous or disastrous — they just prefer their guy for opaque and disagreeable reasons of their own.

Meanwhile, I think all the rest of us are pigeons in a box, pecking frantically to avoid punishment. I think there will be an overwhelming turnout on the left. My theory is that this has been unaccounted for in the polling.

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Okay, moving on. Please note the twinned photos below, which I lifted from CNN’s website. Reminder: the candidate on the left is a White man, and the candidate on the right is a Black woman.

My God, he is a raving lunatic. Here’s his actual ghost face without the mud he neurotically trowels on.

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Oh, by the way, Tucker Carlson is also nuts. Did you read this bizarre interview? I don’t want to spoil it by telling you what’s in it.

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I’ll leave you with two things. This:

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And this. You will need earbuds if you are at work or in some other civilized, convivial place.

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Finally, a sweet, warm Gene Pool Gene Poll. Consider it comfort food today, a piping hot pie chart like your mama might have made.

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There will be no real time questions and observations today, but you should send them in anyway, onaconna I will haul the good ones out tonight. Send them here:

Also, feel free to Comment, below.

Look for a new auxiliary Gene Pool arriving in your inboxes around 8 p.m. Reminder: I suspect much of the action will happen in the Comments. You do need to be a paid subscriber to participate in that. If necessary, please consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.” It can be done as cheaply as $5.

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See you at 8.

And good luck to all of us. And to The United States.