Election day is tomorrow and campaigns are in their final push. TV ads are coming fast and furious. They have vicious overtones. Remembering that all elections are local, GOP ads on my TV are vicious, touting Democratic candidates as hand picked by Nancy Pelosi as “outsiders are trying to pick our elected officials.” Another shows people climbing over a wall; they are supposed to be immigrants scaling the wall on the southern border, at least that’s what the voiceover is telling us. “Democrats are for open borders!” it warns. Who can believe this stuff? The Georgia GOP has seized on a phrase from a speech by Stacy Abrams, Democratic gubernatorial candidate, “the blue wave consists of… illegal immigrants” implying that her campaign was sending illegal immigrants to vote. This message is a counter to Abrams’s charges of voter suppression against Kemp, a paragon of the fantasy of voter fraud who has made it his mission to obstruct voting by minorities in the state. If You Worry About Election Integrity, Look At Your Secretary of State ,Making Voting Harder in Georgia

GOP spin is that he is simply enforcing Georgia law. He is; they passed the law to increase disenfranchisement of minorities. Georgia is the only state where all the pillars of voter suppression are being used; voter IDs; purging voter rolls using various versions of exact match; closing and moving polling places; limiting access to DMV offices to obtain IDs; manipulating early voting hours; variable staffing in precincts to create lines, etc.  While many of the precinct decisions are made by local boards, the majority are Republican. All of these mechanisms differentially impact minority and student voters. African Americans make up about 30% of the electorate but the list of exact match voters that a judge ordered Kemp to allow to vote is 80% African American. More importantly, Kemp could reverse those decisions as violations of laws that insure equal access to the ballot.

The Republicans like that say in defense that over 900,000 new voters have registered in this cycle. They haven’t mentioned that over a million of Georgia’s 6 million voters have been purged in just the last two election cycles. Kemp believes that voting is a privilege, not a right and that privilege should not be extended to minorities. He comes from a long line of Georgia good ole boys who practiced the grand tradition of Black disenfranchisement. But isn’t voting a right granted in the Constitution by several amendments?

We have our George Soros conspiracy commercials too. Democrats, in contrast have never talked about the real and documented conservative conspiracy by the Koch brothers who are proud and imminently satisfied with their results. The Koch Klatch’s conspiracy to seize the government is decades old. They fund the Tea Party, Americans for Prosperity and the Heritage Foundation. One of their members, Robert Mercer, funds Steve Bannon, Breitbart and the Trump campaign once Bannon hand picked him as the anointed candidate. They are spending billions not only to support candidates and issues but also create the current narratives of conservative politics. Antonin Scalia, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are all products of their stream of “originalist” Constitutional scholars and the Federalist Society. And yet, we have never seen any Democrats screaming about Koch conspiracies, even as their dollars are pouring into not just elections, but colleges, think tanks, lobbying organizations and political organizations, dubbed “social welfare” organizations for tax purposes. What’s Up With the Brothers Koch These Days?

Electioneering is sloganeering. We don’t have elections about the political and policy positions of individual candidates any more. We have a lot of character assassination. We’ve slid into parliamentary style campaigning where candidates represent party platforms and voters cast their ballots for a party. Except in the place of platforms, we have all consuming party identity that borders on obsession.

Indeed, we have single issue identifications that have become personal. People vote that identity, no matter what stance a candidate may have on other issues. “I only vote pro-gun or pro-forced childbirth or pro choice or pro-gun control or pro-environment;  I don’t care what their position is on education or highway maintenance in my local district is”. This is true even when the elected official has no duties that would impact those issues. This is how local elections have become nationalized and local issues have taken a back seat to national propaganda.

While we normally identify Republicans with low taxes and fewer government services, it is not always the case for local or state candidates. For instance, Kemp’s ad says he supports pre-existing conditions. He doesn’t have a record on the subject. The key question is how? More details are nowhere to be found. Everyone supports comparable health insurance rates for non- and pre-existing medical conditions, or at least now they say they do. The devil is in the plan details. We do know that Kemp is against Medicaid expansion in a state where rural hospitals are closing their doors in the wake of financial insolvency. The crisis in rural healthcare is directly tied to rural poverty, low Medicaid reimbursement rates and the enormous burden of uncompensated emergency care.  

Clearly the ads are not designed to illuminate policy stances or concrete proposals of the candidates. So where do you go to learn about the candidates? That takes a lot of heavy lifting. The League of Women voters used to have information about candidates; now for the most part, it has links to the candidates’ websites. How about local news? There’s plenty in Atlanta, but they are primarily short interviews that seem to be more platforms for rhetoric than what will their policies be. Public broadcasting has broadcast a series of debates for statewide races, but nobody’s talking about local races. National Public Radio has done more in-depth pieces, but again the breath of their information is limited for the most part to statewide candidates.

Atlanta still has a local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution but most of the state does not, especially in rural areas. There, information from candidate mailers with a few lines of  slogans or attack predominate. The loss of local newspapers has delivered another sledgehammer to the cement of local community. Macon, Savannah and Columbus have local TV stations; Augusta has Trump/Fox TV.  

So that leaves the internet. Many of the candidates’ websites I’ve seen had very little information on policy, especially if it is outside the hot buttons issues. I must confess that I haven’t checked lately because I voted early and they may have updated them since. And that leads to another point. But the effort needed to go find each individual candidate’s name and go  from candidate to candidate to read through their material is a lot more than most people are willing to devote. It’s so much easier to run the ballot by party affiliation than to do any deep digging. And in this age of party schisms, that may be sufficient.

The media, and campaign strategists haven’t caught up with the realities of early voting. Most states have expanded early voting opportunities, except where they’re trying to suppress minority voters. While early voter turnout exploded this year, it had been increasing over several election cycles. Absentee ballot voters have also skyrocketed and not just because people will be away on election day. And yet, every night the TV news and even the late night talk shows start with a countdown to election day. But a significant number of people across the country have already voted. So the audience won’t have the benefit of whatever news features they’re running.

Likewise, the traditional model of campaigning waits until the last couple of weeks to roll out the big guns, like saturation TV and radio advertising, robocalls, etc. Shouldn’t they adjust their tactics to account for a significant proportion of voters going to the polls before the last week? And what happened to the rise of internet advertising? Again, I have only recently returned to Facebook sworn to keep a low profile, so I may have missed the targeted ads from the lack of profile data.

Facebook ads wreaked havoc in the CelebrityPresident election. Granted Facebook has done a lot of whack-a-moling, it seems like the legit advertisers should be doing more. Facebook has moved to prioritize personal news over the political in its newsfeed and that may have curtailed political ads. I never looked at the newsfeed when I used to be on the site and now I don’t have many friends, so it’s pretty empty. And I’ve not seen much media attention to the subject although the New York Times did have a piece on November 5th detailing the explosion of the “jobs, not mobs” phrase https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/04/technology/jobs-not-mobs.html.

The other day, I heard an ad to catch a candidate streaming live on Facebook. WTF? Do I have to run and find them on Facebook? What is the quality of information? Is it an interview, a debate? Who’s asking the questions? Facebook supporters?

The contrast between the Facebook pages of Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp is striking. In the weekend before election day, Abrams page is full of videos from celebrities, Oprah who visited Atlanta last week, Tiffany Haddish and Amy Poehler. Volunteers have posted videos and pictures. It’s filled with visual content.

Kemp has one video from his campaign stops and an endorsement from Herschel Walker, former Georgia football star. There are very few other posts. There is even a post of a petition asking Kemp to resign from the office of Secretary of State, with a few likes. Facebook seems to be an afterthought for his campaign; not many campaigns would leave an adversarial post up for even a day, let alone for 3 months.

There is one similarity. Neither has anything other than campaign positions. Abrams has based her campaign on explanations and data, rather than slogan, so there is some of that. She does have detailed objectives and policies on her web page. Kemp has nothing substantive anywhere.

He does have new conspiracies. Over the weekend, he announced that the Democrats (the party?) tried to hack voter files. Nothing specific; no explanation, no details. How does he know it was the Democrats? What files did they attack? What information did they get? It sounds suspiciously like a campaign fantasy. It is particularly ironic, given that Kemp has staunchly defended the security of elections system in response to a couple of  documented security breaches in 2015 during his tenure as Secretary of State. He even refused FBI assistance in the wake of disclosures of Russian hacking Can We Trust Our Elections? Maybe Not?. At one point, he thought he could get political capital out of accusing the FBI of responsibility for the Georgia hack. Even then, he was channeling Agent Orange.

I would be remiss not to note that the rural area in Georgia in the south central portion of the state is an telecommunications black hole. They have not crossed the digital divide. Cell phone coverage is poor, with blackout areas for miles. These are counties where the median family income of a significant portion of the residents is at or below the federal poverty limit and internet access is not widely available in homes. Most access is through small screens in homes that have no pads, laptops or computers. For many, its computers at the public library. Stacey Abrams, acutely aware of these deficits, has been grassroots organizing for more than two years, going directly to people in rural communities to register voters. Kemp‘s campaign seems to be acknowledging the internet dessert by minimizing its own media presence and leaving the social media attacks to conservative PACs.

The quest to become an informed voter is out of fashion these days. Maybe it has always has been. Behavioral experts tell us that negative messages are more persuasive than positive ones. Humans are hardwired to prioritize negative messages, the so called “negativity bias” perhaps because they convey the potential for harm and trigger the fight-or-flight physiological response. We react more forcibly to negative aspects because they may require action.

In addition, people fear loss more than they celebrate gain. Tell us we will lose something and we’re angry, even if we don’t yet possess it. So political messages are cast in the light of loss-they’ll take your guns away; they’ll take away women’s control over their bodies rather than positive messages – we work to ensure access to a full menu of contraceptive choices. If a candidate’s telling you they’re going to defend you against something, you’re meant to worry about losing it.

Social media magnifies negativity in the extreme. Driven by algorithms based on number counts rather than content, the more extreme the message, the more popular it becomes. It’s popularity results in even more extreme responses so they too can become popular. Everyone wants to be trending.

Everyone seems to be angry. The electorate has been energized. A larger proportion of the electorate will vote in these mid-terms than in any recent one. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Democracy should thrive when the electorate is fully engaged. And yet, people seem to be going off half cocked, deluged with at best half-truths, at worst sheer lies.

Dominating 45’s narratives is a fantastical scenario of thousands of “strong big men” organized by Democrats or Jews, take your pick, marching through Mexico. Any moment, they will storm the border. To meet this threat to national security, the White Nationalist in Chief has mobilized a larger military force than is deployed in Afghanistan to stop them.

But for the non-Trump/Fox TV audience, a dwindling number of primarily women and children have sought the safety of one of several caravans to march from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to seek asylum. They have no weapons. They are begging for food and water. Many fear for their lives in countries dominated by gang violence and corrupt governments. Women are particularly vulnerable to kidnap and sexual assault. Many have been extorted. They must be pretty desperate to walk 2880 miles for an uncertain asylum application. Many have dropped out. The caravan has just arrived at Mexico City, still over 1800 miles away. An almost certain smaller number of immigrants will arrive a couple of months from now. Unless they are prevented from entry, they will come to entry points and apply for asylum. If the last caravan is any indication, over 80% of those who applied qualified for consideration, although Sessions has crafted a shifting sand of criteria, so that may not hold. Trump may shut down asylum applications altogether, or perhaps just from Central America.

Does the caravan have implications for the electorate? Certainly. Immigration policy is a major problem for the country. The asylum process is broken; Agent Orange has the troops planning for large tent city detention centers. The country will have its own version of refugee camps like Bangladesh and Kenya. Beyond the asylum process, the immigration system is broken. The White Nationalist in Chief wants to restructure it to exclude people of color, unless they’re rich.

Congress has abandoned its responsibility for legislating an immigration policy. Mitch McConnell doesn’t have that on his docket. If it comes up, he will wait for the executive branch to tell him what bill he should produce from a conference of senior legislators and bring it to the floor at the last minute for a vote.

Agent Orange introduced the issue of immigration. If we want to solve the problems with immigration, we need to have a cogent discussion about the kind of immigration policy we want and communicate that to our congressional representatives. Has there been good information in this campaign season? Not from the candidates. We need to have that in mind when we go to the polls. That discussion can not happen with a rubber stamping Congress and a would be all powerful chief executive blasting racist epithets through a bullhorn. We need to start reconstituting those two branches, one piece at a time.

Vote November 6th! There’s still time to bone up on the candidates best suited to your local issues. And vote for the integrity of an independent Congress.