A Good Democrat, a Fax Machine, and a Conscientious Vote

Steven Okun might be the smartest Democrat I’ve met. He worked on Bill Clinton’s successful campaign and moved to Singapore before the country known as a “little red dot” became fashionable. He doesn’t rely on polls because his data shows recent presidential victories relied on fewer than 100,000 votes in swing states, meaning 0.0006% of votes were the difference. Best of all, he’s charismatic. What Okun doesn’t do is explain how we ended up here, with the finest of cloths covering our national decline. First, let’s summarize his presentation at Singapore’s RSIS.

SUMMARY 

An election is ultimately about the nation’s mood, and Americans have never been this unhappy. Since 1980, when less than 30% of Americans are dissatisfied about the country’s direction, the incumbent always loses. [Note: Is VP Kamala Harris considered an incumbent?] 

Biden’s 2024 re-election team had questionable skill. Even the campaign slogan was terrible: “Finish the Job.” [Update: Okun says “Finish the Job” was terrible for a “change election,” but as the incumbent, Biden did not have much choice than to have such a slogan.] 

A Harris victory requires her to separate herself from Biden, which her campaign slogan recognizes: “A New Way Forward.” 

Among female voters, Donald Trump has a real problem with abortion. “Without the abortion [issue], women love me,” Trump said. As elections get tighter, Maine and Nebraska require special attention because of their unique electoral systems. Maine and Nebraska split electoral votes. 

Okun believes this election contains the most pointed insults in American history, with Trump calling Harris, among other things, “mentally ret*rded.” Why is this election so nasty? Trump cannot get 50% of the popular vote, so he needs to stop Harris from reaching the 50% number. (Trump’s baseline is about 47 to 48%.) 

Pennsylvania will be key. Democratic strategist James Carville once described the state as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with [conservative] Alabama in between.” Okun provided a more humorous rendition: “You’ve got working-class folks in Pittsburgh who vote Democrat, you’ve got educated Black and White folks in Philadelphia who vote Democrat, and in between, you’ve got Alabama without the Blacks.” 

Will hurricanes in southern states, including North Carolina, affect people’s votes based on their view of the government’s response? We don’t know. 

Harris has singer Taylor Swift, and Trump has billionaire Elon Musk. 400,000 people registered to vote because Swift told them to, but will they actually vote? Musk has provided funding to Trump, but will it make a difference? Though Trump is a billionaire, it’s Harris who has raised a billion dollars, which she can concentrate on swing states. 

For the first time, the DNC is spending funds organizing overseas voters, who generally lean Democratic. Okun called overseas voters “the secret swing state.”

Regarding Harris’s VP choice, most VPs are not from swing states. They are typically chosen to compensate for something missing in the president’s base or the president himself. For example, Mike Pence was chosen to help Trump with Christian conservatives. Bill Clinton’s campaign was different—the Democrats wanted to present two progressive Southerners against Northern elites. (It worked.) 

Trump’s trade policy is transparent: “The most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff.” Countries with trade deficits like Vietnam should be worried, but countries with trade surpluses will fare better: “Singapore is safe” under Trump. Also, though media attention has focused on America’s trade policies, Chinese overcapacity affects many countries, some of which have already placed 200% tariffs on China. [Note: when recently visiting Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, I saw numerous articles concerned about Chinese imports harming domestic manufacturers.] If China uses Vietnam and other countries as middlemen, it could bypass Trump’s policies; yet, if trade enforcement is too stringent or complex, legitimate domestic companies could suffer. 

Okun says ESG should include another G for “Geopolitics.” He says he used to work at the intersection of government and business, and now “I say I work at the collision of government and business.”

Trump will demand more from Japan, South Korea, and other highly developed countries to maintain American military bases. From Trump’s perspective, why is America sacrificing troops in some countries when those countries can invest in their own military? 

Trump’s appointees will matter greatly. In Singapore, personnel is not policy—everyone is competent, and everyone follows the dominant political party. Under Trump, “personnel is policy”—the agency appointee will largely determine specific policies. [Trump’s Cabinet choices in his first term were questionable. Presumably, he would have a better team the second time, though many are concerned about Project 2025’s evangelical Christian agenda.] 

Regarding Michigan, Okun doesn’t believe third party candidate Jill Stein will be a factor. He said voting turnout will be between voters and the couch (i.e., apathy vs. action, disenchantment vs. hope).

“We need actual structural change. And in order for us to achieve that, we are going to need  to fight. So I’m not here as a spoiler.” — Green Party VP candidate Dr. Butch Ware

Okun ended with two humorous anecdotes. He paraphrased Winston Churchill: “If you’re under 30 and a Republican, you have no life; if you’re over 30 and a Democrat, you have no money.” He also shared a story about a fax machine used by both Democratic and Republican legislators in the 1990s. When asked why they didn’t have separate fax machines, he was told, “Why would we waste taxpayer money on two fax machines? If something comes in and it’s for him, I don’t look it, and vice-versa.” Okun realizes we won’t return to similar levels of civility on Capitol Hill, but we need to reclaim camaraderie.

ANALYSIS

Having summarized Okun’s presentation, let’s examine it and his responses to questions more closely. 

I asked why Okun believes Biden was a good president, aside from stock market highs and competent judicial appointees. Okun’s answer indicated more Party loyalty than genuine affection. He said a low inflation target was met, the unemployment rate was at historic lows, and lots of legislation was passed. 

I asked about GOP challenges to voter rolls and ballot counting in Georgia and Michigan, and Okun responded generally: the GOP is doing everything it can to sow mistrust into the system. Actual cases of voter fraud are miniscule.

Here is where we see, in one of its most honest and good insiders, why the Democratic Party deserves to lose the 2024 elections: a refusal to credit the opposition when credit is due. A competent culture does not ignore potential problems; if it does, an opposing force will seize the opportunity not only to highlight gaps, but to offer solutions.

Regarding voter registration, it’s true a recent Michigan case did not order a change in voter lists. Federal law requires only a “general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” 52 U.S.C. § 20507(a)(4). When voters die, change residences, or are convicted of a felony, they should be removed from voter rolls. Today, no one knows if voters with prior registrations in other states or unqualified voters have caused illegitimate ballots. Appellate courts can only examine if a process is in place to remove ineligible voters, and if they are told a process exists, and reasonable effort is being applied, they are not allowed to deviate from a lower court’s rendition of the facts.  Who determines what is reasonable? Oftentimes, politically-partisan voters or politically-partisan Governors or Senators have influence. Luckily, the recent Michigan opinion is flawless. It recognizes issues with existing voter lists but explains existing law allows such gaps: 

“The NVRA prohibits states from removing voters suspected of moving until at least two federal general elections have passed since those voters failed to respond to an official notice. 52 U.S.C. § 20507(d)(1)(B)(ii)” 

Do you see the problem? A state wants to give more than one chance to a voter who may have been too busy to see or respond to an initial government notice, or who may have been out of the country for some time. At the same time, as razor-thin margins become normal, eight years is too long if 27,000 voters are allegedly ineligible, and there is nothing the court can do about it unless the law is changed. Which political party is more likely to change the law? The GOP. 

The reason voter rolls are now more accurate than ever is because of GOP-funded litigation since at least 2020. In Michigan, a lawsuit was filed in 2020 that spurred more aggressive examination of ineligible voters. See Daunt v. Benson (Case 1:20-cv-522-RJJ-RSK) and the list maintenance activities settlement in 2021. Were it not for Republicans, Michigan’s voting system would certainly be less accurate. When Okun lambasted the GOP for challenging voter registration, including overseas voting ballots, why didn’t he also praise the GOP for being pro-active in 2020? If he’s sincere about sharing fax machines or inboxes on Capitol Hill again, surely credit must be given where credit is due. 

The Democratic Party’s culture of not providing full background information isn’t limited to voter registration. When Okun highlighted abortion as a pivotal issue, why didn’t he also disclose that post-Dobbs v. Jackson, seventeen states and the District of Columbia protect abortion rights through local or state laws? According to Ballotpedia,

“As of October 22, 2024, 11 statewide ballot measures related to abortion were certified in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Nevada, and South Dakota for the general election ballot in 2024. This is the most on record for a single year.”

In short, Trump’s Supreme Court Justices did not ban abortion in America—they merely shifted the matter to the states to decide. In 2023, Ohio passed a constitutional amendment conferring the right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” Earlier, in 2022, Kansas voters—mostly Republican—voted to preserve access to abortion. None of those new states’ rights would have been likely without Trump. I’ve attended two talks by Okun, an accomplished attorney, and he raised abortion and Trump’s pro-life stance multiple times but never “states’ rights.” Why?

Additionally, when Okun characterized this presidential election as the most pointed in American history, is he aware Abraham Lincoln’s political opponent once used the n-word and called Lincoln’s political party “The Black Republicans”? Or that John Adams called Alexander Hamilton a “bastard brat of a Scotch Pedler” multiple times?  Newspapers were no better. Horace Greeley of the The New York Tribune referred to Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass as a man “whose life has been spent in grasping greedily after vast tracts of land, buying up large estates round Detroit, &c. and selling them out in small town lots, huckster fashion, at immense profits to tradesman and immigrants.” (Sound more familiar if we switch Detroit to NYC?)

Are sex scandals new? Newspaper editor James Callendar exposed President Jefferson's affair with slave Sally Hemings. Andrew Jackson’s campaign accused John Adams of being a “pimp.” “The accusation was derived from Adams working as an ambassador to the Russian Empire, where he hired a young woman to serve as his wife’s personal assistant. Exaggerating the real details of Adams’ work, Jackson’s campaign claimed that the young woman was given to Czar Alexander I by Adams as a gift.” (Source: Nicholas J. Dilley, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum) 

Fast-forward to 2024, and we have more Russophobia: 

“Some of the 51 ‘Spies Who Lie’ were active CIA contractors when they claimed files from first son Hunter Biden’s laptop had ‘the classic earmarks’ of Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 election — a fact that was uneasily noted inside the agency at the time, new records acquired by The [NY] Post show.” — posted by House Judiciary Committee on June 25, 2024

Has anything truly changed in American elections? Okun’s fax machine is the perfect example of the phrase, “The medium is the message.” Of course the shift from fax to email caused less trust. After all, America resulted from religious strife suffered by European refugees who avoided fatal European levels of hatred only because America’s vastness made segregation, then gerrymandering, palatable. Everything looks civil when you let Catholics have Boston, give Mormons the entire state of Utah, and favor Protestants in Nashville. As the internet age expanded our access to each other irrespective of physical boundaries, for the first time, subjective ideological beliefs and cultural fictions could be challenged in real-time. When locally-protected culture is attacked by well-researched truth, we shouldn’t mind. Unfortunately, we’ll never reach an agreement on the truth if the best and brightest within the Democratic Party refuse to acknowledge gaps in the voting process, Trump’s relative normalcy within presidential politics, and Republican efforts to render a more perfect union. 

Finally, if you’re in Michigan, consider voting for Dr. Jill Stein and Dr. Butch Ware. A Jewish physician and an African-American Muslim professor won’t win this election, but at least your vote won’t support moral failure or false joy. 

© Matthew Rafat (October 23, 2024 from Singapore)