Atlanta vs Georgia

 Interesting piece in the WaPo about the slow movement of Georgia towards Democrats during our time in Trumpistan. Unlike the NYTimes version of this story that would only focus on the Jasper Republicans, this piece dives into the Newton Democrats - especially a younger woman, a nurse, who switched from Reagan Republican to Independent to firm Biden voter.

The Senate elections in about a month are critically important to the health of the nation. If Democrats win both seats, Biden will be able to confirm judges, pick a Cabinet he wants and reshape certain aspects of the government via reconciliation. McConnell won't be able to protect his caucus from taking unpopular votes on bills that pass the House, as he does now.

Trump is actively shitting all over Republicans in Georgia and claiming the election is rigged. Trump voters - and there are a lot of them - might sit the run-off out in protest. God, I hope so.

The Politics Of Resentment

 I came across this piece in Vox about how Asian American communities - while voting 2 to 1 for Biden - have been inundated with actual fake news. Because "Asian American" includes a wide variety of ethnic groups, from Vietnamese to China to Taiwan to Korea...that's a lot of cultural and historical difference. 

A lot of (white) Progressives assumed that Trump's naked racism and xenophobia would repel immigrant groups across cultural divides. They tended to neglect the impact of "Biden is a socialist" on communities that have a large number of people who fled communism. Florida Cubans have always trended towards the GOP, but Venezuelans have the same dynamic. Those same trends apply to many Asian American groups.

What's interesting is the advent of Epoch Times, a news organization tied to the Falun Gong exercise cult. While Falun Gong are...weird...the amount of persecution they have suffered at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party is appalling. Still their virulent opposition to the CCP has led them to embrace Far Right Populism from Germany, France to Trump. Like many aspects of the Far Right, the Epoch Times/Falun Gong movement feeds on resentments without actually properly identifying the accurate source of those resentments.

The focus on resentment feeds into something called "relative deprivation theory." Basically, revolutionary movements feed off the gap between where people are and where they think they should be. In the US, this accounts for why the Rose Twitter Socialists are largely college educated podcasters from Brooklyn. They live in one of the more affluent countries in the world in a time of relative abundance and yet the gap between what they expected and what they have is so large, they want a "revolution" that will overturn a system that seems to hold their dreams at an arm's length.

This politics of resentment isn't inherently constructive or positive. It is - at its roots - negative. It is also non-ideological and can be grafted onto the Democratic Socialists of America as easily it can be wedded to Trumpism. It can apply to Falun Gong political refugees in Orange County as easily as it can Marine Le Pen's National Front in France.

What's more, the politics of resentment finds objective, balanced truths unimportant. Anger and fear are emotions that chew up reason. Since reason ideally sits in the center of democratic governance, the natural alliance between groups like the Epoch Times and Donald Trump is disturbing.

The good news, if there is any, is that there remains potential growth for Democrats among groups that have been fed a steady diet of resentment and fear. Biden is not a scary socialist and many that lauded Trump because their stock portfolios were doing well are not likely to be upset by a Biden Administration. Incumbents usually win, because things aren't usually THAT bad. 

Combatting the end of objective truth is a tall order for a political movement, but that is where we are. Despite the efforts of groups like the Epoch Times, Biden DID still win close to 2/3rds of Asian American votes. Twitter basically started flagging Trump's tweets as lies, as did mainstream media outlets. The next question is how to bring factual accountability to Facebook and other news aggregators. People who want to watch OANN or read Breitbart...they are lost causes. Fighting the casually misinformed is a necessity for the political survival of democracy.

UPDATE: Martin Longman has a slightly different, but more profound take.

The Canary

 Every day, we are treated to stories about a (smallish) group of Americans who not only won't wear masks, but actively make it hard and whine about people who do. As with so many iterations of Cleek's Law ("Modern Conservatism believes the opposite of whatever Liberals believe, updated every 15 minutes."), this one is in overdrive. "Conservatives" are not only advocating for choice over themselves, but choices that imperil people around them. Not getting the eventual vaccine is bad, but not wearing a mask is fucking criminal.

Which brings us to a problem bigger than Covid: climate change. As Jon Chait notes, the Republican party is arguing the following position: 

- Climate change is probably real.
- It may even be manmade.
- We aren't going to do anything about it.

Chait's right; this is pathological. 

Republicans are harboring hope for some sort of Hail Mary technology that will simultaneously avoid the worst effects of global warming while still making Exxon profits. Let's say someone came up with a cheap and efficient way to create pure hydrogen from water. Hydrogen could be used both to store solar and wind power in fuel cells and replace certain aspects of fossil fuels, including high temperature industrial practices and potentially vehicle fuel. Sounds great, right? 

A fair read of the Republican position is that this would be bad. From the original piece in the Washington Examiner:

Republicans remain opposed to any policies that would reduce fossil fuel use, a stance they feel was rewarded by the results of House races in oil and gas districts in which incumbent Democrats lost after struggling to disassociate from Biden’s plans to transition to clean energy.

“If you think you can kill the oil and gas industry, that will have political consequences,” Reed said.

This is lunacy. 

Energy is a critical aspect of any economy. I remain convinced that the majority of the economic problems of the 1970s have energy prices as their root cause. Cheap, clean energy should be the holy grail of continued economic development. Renewables are now CHEAPER than most fossil fuels, especially coal. The problem with solar and wind is that they have a great deal of up-front costs, but then are largely dirt cheap. For an economy that looks beyond the next fiscal quarter's earning report, installing a shitload of solar and wind is a no-brainer, especially with interest rates at effectively zero.

What this means is that we should have a government that is helping to ease the costs of solar and wind installation, but one of the major parties - alone among all the mainstream political parties in the developed world - is basically saying they won't support these efforts, if it has the effect of reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

The behavior of "conservatives" to Covid is a shocking precursor to climate change, as the effects get worse and worse. As they are confronted with ecosystem collapse and impossible living conditions in parts of the country, as cities bake and forests burn, they will shout and whine about whatever the climate equivalent of wearing a damned mask is.

Again, it is hard to distance these positions from the unique form of American Evangelical Christianity, and it's rigid, unchallengeable faith system. American Jesus can never be wrong, and American Jesus happens to believe whatever I believe, including the fact that I don't have to wear a mask or stop burning coal.

We are deeply, deeply screwed.

Trashing The Place

 As emotional toddler, Trump is going to smash as much as he can between now and January 20th. Mostly, I thought, this was going to be a series of horror-inducing regulatory and hiring moves that would hamstring Biden's "Hundred Days" to the extent McConnell lets him have any honeymoon.

There is some evidence to suggest that some of the more nihilistic member of his maladministration want to start ACTUAL fires. None more than my pick as Trump 2.0, Mike Pompeo. Iran's top nuclear scientist was assassinated today, and this is a very big deal. On the one hand, I think Iran has been trying to wait out Trump's presidency, but this might require some sort of response. Unlike the attack on Qasem Soleimani last winter, we actually don't know who assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Maybe it was us, maybe it was Israel; hell, it could have been the Saudis. 

Just as likely, it could have been a joint effort by all three countries. Israel, Saudi Arabia and Trumpistan all have a vested interest in damaging Iran. For Israel and Saudi Arabia, it's part of a large contest for national security. For the Trumpists, it's largely political/rhetorical and part of the Anti-Obama reflex that defines Trump. If Obama was for it, it must be bad. The JCPOA successfully arrested Iran's nuclear program, but Obama did it, so it was bad. The US leaving the JCPOA and assassinating Soleimani pushed Iran back into developing nuclear weapons, assassinating Fakhrizadeh is a way to stop their weapons program again. 

For Iran, there has to be a weighted decision about whether and where to strike. The where is hard, unless they have some evidence tying the assassination to a specific country. That informs whether to strike. If this was Israel or Saudi Arabia, I would expect them to retaliate. If it was the US, they might wait until January 20th to try a re-set. If it was us, I have always expected Iran to strike at Trump branded properties outside the US.

Mike Pompeo is a religious extremist who wants to bring about the rapture and maybe he thinks he can provoke Armageddon. Trump largely wants to light the world on fire because people were mean to him by not voting for him. McConnell wants to force Biden into a constant state of defense.

Again, if we are involved in this, even through the tangential work of Kushner and others working with Israel, the Gulf States and the House of Saud, this amounts to arson. They are trying to light the world on fire so that Biden has to be a fireman and not a carpenter.

The Long Untangling

 Joe Biden has an abiding interest in foreign affairs and he has moved swiftly to put in place a national security team that will repair institutions here and abroad. What's happening with domestic institutions is going to take even more effort. The Trumpists are placing landmines and wrecking the place on their way out in a wanton act of policy vandalism that could take years to unravel.

In their final weeks in office (yay!), the Trumpists are adding truly atrocious rules that the Biden team will have to roll back. Death by firing squad is only the most outrageous. Most of these rules are just needlessly cruel or inefficient. They are policy tantrums, like the one changing regulations on washing machines and shower heads. The industries who make these devices might like fewer regulations, but they really want policy certainty. I doubt many industries are going to rush into a business model where they structure their plants to pollute more, knowing that these regs will get overturned in time.

Finally, we can hope that perhaps the defining characteristic of Trumpistan - its abiding incompetence - will save many of these rulings. Some have already been struck down in court and a Biden DOJ can simply drop the appeals. Most will no doubt contain some elementary blunder that will allow a court to reverse it. But we can't forget that the overruling purpose of Trumpistan for Establishment Republicans was control over the Judicial branch.

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic has been one of the greatest analysts of Trumpistan and early on he encapsulated it's central ethos: The cruelty is the point. As he shambles off the stage, Trump will add chaos and dysfunction to the main ethos of his presidency.

Pardon Me?

 There are rumors that Trump is going to throw pardons around like paper towels in a disaster zone. Meanwhile, sentient herpes sore, Matt Gaetz, has suggested Trump self-pardon in order to own the libs.

Presidential pardons are largely unchecked, except by violations of state law. Trump can't pardon people who have been convicted or indicted for state crimes. That includes himself. The NY Attorney General apparently has charges ready to go, but so does the Southern District of the US Attorney General's office. Pardoning Flynn, Stone, Manafort and others is - sadly - within the president's power. 

When creating the pardon power, the Framers suggested that if a president were to pardon those close to him, who were possibly co-conspirators or witnesses against him, that would be worthy of impeachment. If the past 25 years have taught us anything, it's that impeachment is functionally dead as a means of controlling an outlaw presidency. Whether Congress could pass and Biden could sign a bill preventing presidents from pardoning people in their own orbits and then have it pass constitutional muster is an open question. This is yet another example of Trump violating norms that have proven to be insufficient to restrain an out-of-control executive. Any bill limiting the pardon power could not be applied retroactively to Trump, but it's still worth doing.

Self-pardoning is quite likely to fail, but you would hate to wager whether Roberts, Gorsuch and either Barrett or Kavanaugh would embrace a decision that might result in a GOP President facing legal jeopardy. In Trump's case, self-pardoning would also be pre-emptive pardoning, since he's not been indicted or convicted of anything. Yet. However, pardons for his brood and minions are on the table.

It's Gaetz's hackery that deserves commentary, because it's a pure distillation of what the Republican Party has become. Gaetz is arguing that everything - including the objective commission of crimes - is a partisan issue. Trump shouldn't pardon people because there has been a miscarriage of justice or a penalty out of proportion to the crime. He should do it because liberals are mean stinkypants. 

That's it. That's the reason.

The President of the United States should take his one really monarchical power and abuse it to anger those who want to see lawbreakers brought to justice. The same party caterwauling about law and order when the window of a Starbucks gets shattered wants Trump to pardon people who actively embezzled millions, worked with America's enemies and committed sundry acts of fraud that have crippled the efficacy of the American state and robbed taxpayers.

The Republican Party once billed itself as the "Party of Ideas." That was 40 years ago, and that idea was mostly immiserating the poor and minorities to feed the rich. Nowadays, they can't even claim that.

The Electoral College Is STILL A Travesty

 Paul Campos (who is emerging as one of my favorite writers) has a nice math demonstration of how close the election was (despite not being close).

It's looking like Biden will end up with a popular vote victory in the neighborhood of 6,000,000 votes and a percentage win of 4% 51-47. Only Obama's romp in 2008 will have been bigger this century, or indeed since 1988. Biden won a crushing landslide in terms of the amount of people who voted.

In terms of the Electoral College, it's much, much closer. 

Biden's wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania are much more robust than Trump's were four years ago. Nominating the boring white guy from Scranton worked as intended. He won Wisconsin by roughly the same number of votes that Trump did in 2016. He flipped Arizona and Georgia, albeit narrowly.

Campos some "fun with math" where he takes the entire electorate and puts it into "a mid-major conference basketball" gymnasium that seats 7,226. If you filled that arena with proportional numbers of Trump and Biden voters you would get: Biden 3,685; Trump 3,396, Other 145.  He then asks: "How many voters would have to change side in that arena to create a Trump victory. 

The answer is one.

If those votes switched in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, and Trump won those states, it would be a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, the election goes to the House and Trump win because Wyoming has the same vote as California.

After the election of 1800, when the obscure rules of the Electoral College created a tie between Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, and Democratic Republicans became ascendant, there was an opportunity to get rid of the Electoral College. The 12th Amendment could've been "bigger."

As it is, we have demonstrated twice in 20 years the extreme inequity in our system of electing presidents. We have largely avoided the catastrophe that Campos articulates, because people move in large numbers - not by state. 

But we could be headed for a reckoning if we have the so-called "Smoother Trump" come along and win office with a clear minority of the vote again.  Some of this is simply a California problem. The state is too large for its own good or the good of the country. 

This Year's Carol

 On the Twelfth day of Treason

The Trumpers gave to me:
Twelve Sharpies signing,
Eleven MAGA rallies,
Ten pending lawsuits,
Nine misspelled twitters,
Eight million voters,
Seven fake reporters,
Six Steve Mnuchins,
Five grifting kids,
Four Seasons sod,
Three wedding vows,
Two tiny hands,
And a drunk Rudy Giuliani.

Institutionalism

 Amongst the Manic Progressives on Twitter, there is a broad consensus that we shouldn't be patting ourselves on the back until Trump is forcibly ejected from the Oval Office. Until that happens, he could still somehow remain in power. This has largely been because Trump has defied the usual political gravity that sinks most politicians. 

Institutionalists note that Trump actually accomplished very little. He didn't build his wall, he didn't pull the US out of NATO. His trade wars were largely failures. Some of this was Democratic control of the House after 2018, but he was impeached because the institutions of national security rose up and thwarted him. 

As the Post notes, while high profile elected Republicans like Mitch McConnell have been craven and silent, judges and election officials of both parties have swatted away Trump's empty claims of voter fraud. While his QAnon nutters are seizing our attention on the hellscape of cable news, a lot of normal Republicans are abiding by the agreed upon institutions of American political life.

Institutions do not change easily. This is what makes them institutions.

Meanwhile, we have Joe Biden beginning to announce his Cabinet. Trump has waged war on the institutions of foreign policy - the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community. Biden is clearly making his selections to reinvigorate and reinforce those institutions. I haven't been to Twitter yet, but I'm sure the Brooklyn podcasters are up in arms over Anthony Blinken for some obscure fucking reason. Basically, as Biden tries to shore up the institutions of our democracy that Trump waged a four year war of attrition on, the Rose Brigade - who fancy themselves revolutionaries - will despair that their revolution isn't coming.

And thank dog for that.

Trumpism 2024

 There are two takes on who will run in 2024 as the "next Trump." Paul Campos makes the strong point that Trump will run if he's legally able. Campos is a little cynical about Trump not being prosecuted because he's a rich white guy. I think there will be criminal charges against him in both state and federal court, but it's going to be next to impossible to find a neutral jury. But let's assume Trump can't or doesn't run.

Campos breaks the potential replacements into conventional politicians like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, thinking Hawley is the likely candidate. Or maybe Don Jr or Ivanka runs. I doubt Ivanka runs, and she has the charisma of a week old PB&J sandwich. Finally, he settles on Tucker Carlson, which I think is a smart bet. Campos lists the attributes of Trumpism (in admittedly less than flattering terms):

*Open white supremacy

*Open nativism

*Open misogyny

*Open contempt for experts, intellectuals, universities, etc.

*Open embrace of reactionary Christianity as the informal state religion

*Open hatred of independent journalism

*Open authoritarianism

*A cult of personality organized around a celebrity

I think that misses the point of Trumpism, which is more the distillation and endpoint of Cleek's Law, namely that "conservatives believe the opposite of what liberals believe, updated every 15 minutes." Trump is the raging sputtering id from OANN (Fox has become too tame).  The open embrace of odious positions was less from conviction - though that was part of it - and less because it's the opposite of what the cultural left proposed.

As I've said elsewhere, Trumpism isn't about the lyrics, it's about the music, and not everyone has the ear to hear it. Stiffs like Cruz, Cotton and Rubio aren't going to match the music. Carlson might.

Jennifer Rubin, bless her heart, believes that the support of people like Rubio, Cruz, Cotton, Hawley or Nikki Haley should disqualify them from being elected in 2024. As we have seen from Trump, outrageous behavior by GOP politicians has no real negative consequence. Their support for Trump is the minimal entry requirement for being nominated in 2024.

For my money, the GOP nominee will almost have to be an asshole. Not someone pretending to be an asshole, but a real dyed in the wool dick. Also, not a loathsome shitheel like Ted Cruz, but the sort of blustering asshole that feeds the warm fuzzies of GOP voters. The pugnaciousness of Trump was his biggest selling point. There was no policy (literally, in the case of the 2020 platform) but rather an attitude of bluster and defiance and tearing shit up.

For this reason, I think Mike Pompeo stands a strong chance of being the calmer, more dangerous Trump. He's a West Point grad and has somewhat more message discipline than the intemperate Trump. He's a huge asshole in all the important ways, but his military service removes one of Trump's weaknesses among a section of reliable GOP voters.

Maybe there's some other dickish Republican out there ready to seize Trump's mantle. It's a long way to 2022, when the GOP contest will really kick off. But Pompeo strikes me as being exactly the sort of brutish asshole who appeals to evangelicals and has the right sort of charisma to pull it off.

Loser

 Donald Trump has lost more often in Georgia than the University of Tennessee.

Seriously, Trump's fragile ego is filled with contempt by losers and losing. It's his biggest insult. He's now something like 2-34 in Court, he's lost Georgia in the count, the recount and the certification. Michigan, he's lost two or three times. He's lost in Court in Pennsylvania so many times, I'd feel sorry for his "legal" team if they weren't trying to orchestrate a judicial coup. (Technically, it's only a coup if it comes from the Coup region of France, otherwise it's simply Sparking Autogolpe.) 

There was a surprisingly astute thread for Edward Norton, the actor. He said that, while he isn't a pundit, he's played a lot of high stakes poker, and what Trump is doing is a pot-committed bluff. Trump knows his loss will expose him to endless legal jeopardy. That means he's "pot-committed;" all his chips are in the pot. But he's got not cards. Biden is holding four aces, Trump is trying to draw to an inside straight flush, and as the turn and the river flop, he's left to more and more desperate bets. His only way to win is if the dealer cheats on his behalf, and so far the dealer (the Courts) are having none of it.

Trump has simply stopped doing his job. Like the spoiled toddler he is, he's taking his ball and going home (or at least to his second home: the back nine). Of course, it's not like he ever really did his job in the first place, but whatever. The nation will be adrift as Trump sulks and pouts his way through every coming defeat. Meanwhile, the lack of ascertainment delays the ability of the Biden team to plan the vaccination program or come up to speed on national security issues. 

The psychic wounding of Trump will continue. Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada will certify soon, as will Pennsylvania and Arizona. Trump will sue and lose. The Electoral College will vote in early December, making Biden officially the President-Elect. (At this point, the GSA likely relents and gives him the ascertainment.) In early January, Congress will accept the Electoral College results. 

Each of these moments will send Trump into a spluttering rage as the day of reckoning comes closer. 

The fact that the GOP is either aiding or not opposing Trump's attempted self-coup is genuinely distressing, if not terribly surprising. And next time, it might be close enough to cheat. But don't get too stressed by the flailing machinations of Giuliani and company to not enjoy the tantrums that Trump indulges himself in. 

The Fever Swamps

 I really like this piece by Josh Marshall about how the lunacy of the last two weeks demonstrates where Trump and Trumpism has come from. Maybe it's a bit overdetermined for a journalist to point to journalism as the prime mover towards Trumpistan, but I think it's largely correct.

My version would be a little different and it would incorporate aspects of Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs McWorld.

After generations in the political wilderness, interspersed only by the Eisenhower interregnum, Republicans won back the White House with Nixon making coded racist appeals to white working class voters. Reagan amplified this strategy, adding abortion to the ways to motivate Republican voters. As time went on, however, the economic backbone of Republicanism - massive tax cuts to the rich in order to trickle down to everyone else - became a liability. Bill Clinton in particular demonstrated how a more judicious tax code could stimulate growth. Even on the social issues that motivated many Reagan Era voters, Americans were largely moving away from coded appeals to racism, LGBT bigotry and other issues.

In order to keep stoking their base, as Marshall points out, Republicans had to amp up the rhetoric. Enter Murdoch, Ailes and Fox News as megaphones for the crazy. Fox drew its biggest energy from Democratic presidencies. It was much easier to attack Democratic presidents than to defend Republican ones, and so Fox became the attack dog of the GOP. However, when it came to Obama, there was precious little material to use against him. He and his administration were essentially free from scandal. This meant Fox and the GOP had to gin up nonsense conspiracy theories - Birtherism, the Fast and the Furious, Solyandra and Benghazi. None of these "scandals" had any basis in objective reality. Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother; Fast and Furious was simply a bad idea done poorly, Solyandra was...I'm not even sure what the scandal there was supposed to be; Benghazi was a tragedy, not a scandal.

The batshit lunacy we have seen from Rudy Giuliani and the various Trumpists since the election is entirely a product of having lived in an alternate reality in which "Hunter Biden's" laptop is the most critical thing facing the country. Joe Biden's biggest crime is the occasional act of plagiarism, yet Fox-addled Americans believe he's more corrupt than Trump, who history will show to be America's most corrupt president.

This is the bedrock upon which those who believe America as a unified polity is doomed. When 47% of the country consists of people who believe Donald Trump is qualified for a second term as president, you're screwed.

Barber's argument, made back in the 1990s, was that the world was diverging into "jihad" or excessive localism, parochialism and tribalism (nothing to do with Islam) and "McWorld" the globally integrated economy and culture. His argument further was that neither Jihad nor McWorld cared about or required democracy. Jihad undermined pluralism and McWorld needed workers and consumers, not citizens. 

Trump represents an odd confluence of both trends. He's a New York real estate developer with properties and loans all over the world, but he ran on an expressly "Jihad" message: America is a white tribe and Mexicans are rapists and Blacks are the real enemy. 

This, perhaps, explains the biggest conundrum of the election: places that are hurting economically supported Trump - the incumbent - the most. We have predicated our understanding of elections where there is an incumbent on the fact that people vote their economic self-interest. If things are going well for them, they reward the incumbent party. What 2016 and 2020 show is that "doing well" is much more subjective. 

Trump voters are not "poor." Those pickup trucks with the flags on them can cost $50,000. But it's pretty clear that they feel America is becoming less "America" and more some alternate version that they see on Fox and now OANN. Blue America sees transgender rights as an expression of human dignity and the freedom to be your whole human self; Red America sees perverts trying to enter the "wrong" bathroom. Blue America sees abortion as a necessary resource to allow women to plan for when or if they want to have kids. Red America sees a world where women are aborting healthy babies at 8 months. Blue America sees a moderate redistribution of wealth as necessary for the economic and political well-being of the country. Red America sees Stalinism (Socialism is basically Stalinism, because reasons).

Appeals to fear work when people are already fearful. The "anxiety" felt by Trump voters is both real and imagined. For many of them, McWorld with its declining need for high paying blue collar work IS a real threat to them. But having become fearful, they retreat into Jihad, with its hatred of "outgroups" like people of color, women who don't "know their place," urban dwelling men who use hair products...the list of "not us" is long and growing. Evangelical Christianity is both a precondition and an additional amplifier of this psychology.

Fear breeds hatred, because it channels the powerful internal turmoil outwards at something that does not betray our own weakness and insecurity. 

The GOP message resonates with a people fearful of the changes that they see in the world and then amplifies and extends that fear. (If Democrats think that's absurd, I would suggest they think about how their fear of Trump stealing the election has led them to embrace their own crazy versions of conspiracy theories.) Like a drug addict they need to keep upping their dose.

I don't know how we see ourselves through this.

Poor White Victims Of "Racism."

 When you read this self-pitying emetic whine from Monica Palmer about how people were mean to her and called her a racist for trying to disenfranchise ALL OF DETROIT. Poor thing having to face the consequences of her actions. The move not to certify Detroit created a mild moment of panic online as Democrats and their ilk are just waiting to be disappointed and crushed by an election. From 2000 to 2004 to 2016, the default mode of Democrats is that there will be some way to deny them a victory. It's not illogical so much as it is manic.

However, while I think that we will never really know why the 2020 election was as close as it was, one thing is undeniably clear: both sides were highly motivated to vote. Perhaps this was simply because there were a lot more options for casting a ballot. America makes it hard for people to vote, especially if they're Black, so increased early voting SHOULD lead to more votes. 

It is also very clear, however, that Trump found a lot more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, and I worry that Ms Palmer's lament is at the root of it.

America is a country with white supremacy written into it's DNA. Of course, most nation-states have the same dynamic. The Emperor of China looked at Europeans with disdain until they showed up with steam powered gunboats. In-group/out-group dynamics are not unique to America. Many Americans, however, were raised on a myth of America as a "melting pot" and a "land of opportunity," where George Washington Carver proves that Abraham Lincoln erased racism forever. One reason why one of Trump's ending pitches for his campaign was attacking the NY Times 1619 project was because a large group of White Americans need to feel like whatever sins might have been committed in the past were likely exaggerated and certainly have no legacy today.

This is nonsense. The legacy of racism is still very much with us. Some Whites wish to grapple with this. Maybe they are skeptical of some claims or some solutions, but they frankly acknowledge that the past is real and the "past is not even past." I, for instance, am not a fan of "presentism" in the study of history. Thomas Jefferson WAS a racist, but the fact that he kind of felt bad about it, actually means he was ahead of the curve. To say someone was a "man of their times" does not so much excuse their behavior as indict the time they were living in.

Anyway, there are clearly a majority of Americans who simply do not want to look at racism. To them, simply discussing racism is racist against them. That this is nonsense does not make it less true for them. 

The goal of socially progressive politics should be "fewer bigots." Instinctively, I think people who are socially liberal can agree with this. If there are fewer bigots, that will lead to a healthier, more inclusive, more equal and more equitable society. Whether you're advocating for LGBT rights or criminal justice reform for Blacks or immigration rights for Latine migrants or women's equality in the workplace or whatever, fewer bigots is the preferred outcome.

The current strategy to get to "fewer bigots" is clearly not working, or not working fast enough. Calls for Democrats to reach out to an empathize with Trump supporters are - very understandably - falling on deaf ears. The flag-waving, boat-rally, gear-wearing cultists are irredeemable. Fuck'em. But winning politics is usually accomplished by addition. The GOP is trying to win elections via subtraction, but it's unclear how sustainable this is. Democrats rode the politics of addition to the 2018 House Wave and the best showing by a challenger in a presidential race since 1932. Whether that coalition is sustainable or not is the pre-eminent question facing both parties.

I worry that the language used in anti-racism is effectively shutting out potential additions. How many anti-Trump, soft Republicans in the suburbs will shift back to Republicans with that shit-spackled moron finally ejected from the White House? How do we keep them in the fold? An escalating arms race of performative anti-racism will push them back to their former political home.

It strikes me that a great many slogans employed by - broadly speaking - the Left are politically counterproductive. "Defund the police" was a disaster. "Open borders" is political suicide. Even "Medicare For All" broke down under scrutiny. The language of "White Fragility" made it clear that there was no final redemption for Whites. It was Calvinism without the possibility of God's Grace. 

It is all, effectively, preaching to the choir.

For decades, Republicans camouflaged a deeply unpopular policy agenda behind a rhetoric of patriotism, freedom and "opportunity." They campaigned on one set of values and largely governed by another. Trump was a right wing populist who was going to tear down the corrupt system; he gave the rich huge tax cuts and the Fundamentalists a bunch of judges and then went golfing for four years.

Biden tried, I think, to campaign on a politics of hope and inclusion, but there was so little message discipline from the rest of the party, it was drowned out by political rhetoric that was not very helpful. 

Democrats need to campaign with one set of words and then govern to please the base. The true believers among activists need to push, but do so behind closed doors. Take the half or three-quarters of the loaf and then wait for the next opportunity to push for the rest.

Because if Democrats don't, the 2020 election showed that there is a substantial number of Americans ready to anoint another Trump (or maybe Trump himself) their new personal Jesus in 2024.

The fight is won; the fight isn't over.

Which Mitch?

 The economy is suffering because we have largely left Covid responses to local and state governments. We have no national strategy, but we also know the fall and winter were always going to be hard. We are within sight of a vaccine that will get us out of this.

The Senate is pushing through judges and tried to push through a quack economist to the Federal Reserve board. They do not appear to be interested in helping millions of Americans get unemployment relief.

If McConnell were to schedule a vote, it would pass. Maybe he will pass something to help win the GA Senate races? Regardless, this is yet another stunning example of the failure of the GOP as a legislative party.

Reckoning

 Josh Marshall lays out a case for NOT prosecuting Trump for wrongdoing during his presidency. There is a mealy-mouthed article from NBC suggesting Biden doesn't want to be bogged down re-litigating Trumpistan. The broader point of the NBC piece is true: the President should not direct the Department of Justice in their prosecutions. Presumably, there are a small mountain of charges facing Trump from tax evasion to money-laundering to accepting bribes to fraud that he will no longer be shielded from once he leaves office. Biden is right to take a hands-off approach to this. If crimes are just sitting there waiting to be prosecuted, I don't think Biden will stop them.

Marshall makes the point that Biden would prefer to "move forward" with a policy agenda that address real problems that Americans are facing. Sure. If he has the votes in the Senate, go for it.

My bigger concern is that we have normalized a certain amount of Republican lawlessness. Robert Bork was the hatchet man of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, and Reagan nominated him to be Supreme Court Justice. His rejection by the Senate remains a cause celebre among the Right. Several figures from Iran-Contra, Elliott Abrams springs to mind, showed up in Bush's fustercluck in Iraq. Obama made a decision not to prosecute the Torture Regime under Bush and now sociopathic asshats like John Yoo and John Bolton are still part of the Conservative Establishment.

If Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions and others are not tried for human rights violations for what they did on the southern border, then their behavior gets normalized. If Richard Barr's politicization of the Justice Department is simply exposed and not prosecuted, then his behavior gets normalized.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" only works if both sides of the aisle agree that germs and infections are bad. That's simply not the case anymore.

The Chimes Of Freedumb

 At first and second glances it makes no sense. Where the coronavirus is raging worst, Republicans made electoral gains. As cases mounted - often tied to Trump's Superspreader rallies - Democrats assumed a rational electorate would punish the GOP for their acquiescence to death by virus. The evidence was so very clear that mask mandates and partial closures of high risk activities could save lives by the hundreds and thousands.

This speaks to the broader "re-enchantment" of America. Max Weber described the Enlightenment as the "disenchantment of the world." The movement presumably prioritized rational thinking over the magical thinking of both religion and base superstition. It was clear, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out, that this disenchantment had shallow roots in America.

The Internet seems to have supercharged this anti-intellectual, anti-reason strain in America. The loss of objective truths and shared reality is most crushingly obvious in our response to both Covid and global warming. Reason shows us the path forward, but depressingly large numbers of Americans can't be bothered.

The GOP is proud of their response to Covid, because it was rewarded at the polls. It will lead to dead Americans, but who cares as long as those dead are disproportionately Black and Brown?

During our four years in Trumpistan, it was fashionable for Democratic politicians to say "This isn't who we are."

When it comes to rank anti-intellectualism...yeah, it is exactly who we are.

Maybe...

 This piece looks at the data that turns our understanding of elections on its head. Typically, with an incumbent on the ballot, the election turns into a referendum on the economy. If the economy is doing well, the incumbent gets re-elected, whereas if it's going poorly, the incumbent loses (Hoover, Carter Bush 41). 

The data suggest strongly that counties that are doing well economically voted for Biden, whereas struggling counties went for Trump. The piece notes that Biden counties are filled with college educated workers in growth industries, whereas Trump counties are filled with non-college Whites who feel their economic power drifting away.

The evidence is pretty clear, in my view, that what we are seeing is less a divorce of economics from politics and more the increasing marriage of politics to culture. Rural voters voted for Trump because he manifests their grievances about a changing cultural landscape that, yes, includes economics, but isn't tied to economic well-being. Urban and suburban voters are perched atop Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and are unwilling to live in a country that is manifestly cruel and unjust. 

The equation of economic well-being and support for the incumbent is simply not as relevant. Especially when those rural voters skew heavily towards evangelical Christianity.

The Language We Use Matters

 I have spent the last four years arguing that it's not right to call Trump a fascist. There are certainly fascists that support him, so I can see the confusion. However, Trump is part of a broader populist, authoritarian movement that is fundamentally oligarchical and kleptocratic. Basically, a bunch of rich dudes motivate racial and economic resentment in order to loot the states to enrich themselves and other rich elites. Trump can be a true threat to American democracy without being a fascist.

As this piece by Erica De Bruin lays out, what Trump is doing now is not a "slow motion coup in plain sight." Trump's actions are basically a tantrum, but the tacit and overt support from elected Republicans fits more into "democratic backsliding," a phenomenon in keeping with the description of Trumpist politics above. 

Understanding that Trump is part of the democratic backsliding movement that we have seen in the Philippines, Hungary, Turkey, Poland and, arguably, Russia (was Russia ever a democracy?) is critical to understanding how to fit him. America pioneered mass democracy and the populism that can arise with it. Hopefully, we can help provide the antidote to this movement that could shatter the broad consensus in the developed world about the importance of true, principled liberal democracy. "Having elections" is an insufficient definition of what democracy is. Trump was elected - with a clear minority of the vote - and is claiming victory despite an even greater democratic drubbing.

Trump's ineptitude - Rudy Giuliani is in charge of his electoral legal team? - means there is very little chance of him hanging on past January 20th. There will likely be more street violence, which feeds into Trump's narrative. (I think we need to reckon with the effect that Portland-style violence had in activating authoritarian emotions in many Americans that supported Trump.) The military is extremely unlikely to support a coup. Establishment Republicans are fine with Trump trashing the election results, undermining a democratic system that tilts against them if it helps keep their base angry.

This is bad. It is. But it's not fascism, and it's not a coup.

We Have A Christianity Problem

 Dana Milbank correctly identifies the single most important identifier standing in the way of American progress: White Evangelicals. It is this group that stands in the way of a honest and productive conversation on race, on climate change, on the pandemic, on gender issues and equality. They are the retrograde past of America, and Trump played them like a piano.

In their religion, their special status as Whites and as Christians gives them the mantle of "True Americans," and they can't see the new America birthing around them. Milbank calls them an island drifting away from the rest of us (Little Evangelica). Their faith is built on a willful disregard for facts that contradict their faith, and now Trumpism is part of their faith.

Milbank points out where they sit on the actuarial tables and points to a better future, but I'm becoming worried about the timeframe required to see this cohort shuffle off their mortal coil. We have serious issues to address that cannot be addressed as long as the Culture Warriors of Little Evangelica control one of our major parties.

Defunding The Police Was Always A Loser

 I get the anger at the historic and egregious abuses by police towards people of color. I understand it at a remove, but I get it. However, any message that has to be explained with fifteen caveats and clarifications is a bad message. It also hurts you with precisely the moderate voters that you were trying to lure into your coalition. Those voters likely were on board with police reform and, indeed, many of the specific proposals umbrellaed under "defunding."

But it was bad politics, especially running against a would-be authoritarian.  Finally, there is some evidence that those who bridled at "defunding the police" for the reason that fewer police would make people less safe were right. We saw it in Baltimore after the Freddie Gray murder and now they are seeing it in Minneapolis.

Police power absolutely requires a countervailing check. But you can't do that if your rhetoric hands victories to "Back the Blue" absolutists.

No, Trump Had No Right To Sue

 Eugene Robinson is right that Trump's right to sue everyone and everything over his election loss is not real. He and so many others are right that Trump is doing lasting damage to our ideas about the legitimacy of elections.

There was a pervasive fear among anyone to the left of Mitt Romney that Trump would somehow eek out another narrow win in the Electoral College while getting swamped in the popular vote. As of this morning, Biden has a 5,000,000 vote lead with 50.8% of the vote - a better result than Reagan had in 1980; Trump has managed to win only 47.4% of the vote.  Still, flip about 60,000 votes in the right states and Trump wins reelection. 

If that had happened we would be having a real crisis in our democracy. A man would have been elected president twice without coming close to sniffing a popular vote victory. It would be difficult for Blue States to reconcile their disenfranchisement in the presidency with our attachment to America. 

Instead, we got a clear electoral mandate for Biden. This election was not close.

Republicans pretending that it was - and it's pretty clear that they are pretending - is because they fear and need the Deplorables. While it seems that resistance is eroding and Trump is talking about a run in 2024, the damage is done.

It's amazing no one has been killed yet.

Plague State

 As Trump fulminates over his electoral humiliation and packs the National Security apparatus with hacks, the country is barreling towards a humanitarian catastrophe. The surge in Covid patients is on the brink of overwhelming the country's hospital systems, if it hasn't already. Localized hospital systems are already turning people away. Unlike the spring outbreak - which was focused on certain urban areas - this is hitting everywhere at once. Rural hospitals that are already small and understaffed are pushed over the brink. As we've seen too often over the past 9 months, poorly run nursing homes are going to see lethal outbreaks as efforts to control the pandemic outside their walls spill over into their vulnerable populations.

Trump will continue to do nothing. When actual histories are written about this pandemic - and not the masturbatory lies spread by Trumpists propogandists - the colossal ineptitude of our lack of a response will rank Trump among our 2-3 worst presidents, regardless of all the other heinous shit he's done. Republican politicians, largely sewn to Trump's ass like the human centipede, will follow his lead and 100,000 Americans will die before the year is out. As cases explode and hospital beds fill up, the death rate will lag by a couple of weeks.

What will make this especially tragic is that we are on the cusp of beating this thing. A very effective vaccine is perhaps only a few months away. We also know how this virus spreads, via mid-sized to large indoor gatherings. It spreads in places where people shed their masks like restaurants, bars and gyms. In spreads in the close quarters of a family home, after a family member has been to (or worked at) one of those restaurants or gyms. 

Our fundamental short-sightedness and selfishness as as species is going to get thousands more people killed for no reason. A goddamned cruise ship left port and immediately has a Covid crisis. Europe is getting pummeled, too, and this fall/early winter surge has been predicted all along. Since we know what we need to do, it simply relies on competent government - looking at you, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam - and high levels of social trust to implement plans that we know are effective. What we've learned is that large, unmasked groups spread this disease, so we need to stop meeting in large groups.

We learned as a faculty last night that we are going to get high speed-high accuracy saliva tests when we return in January. We could start seeing vaccines by March.  We are so close. And right as we get to the ending, we are going to kill a bunch of people.

It Needs To Be Said

 E.J. Dionne notes an incontrovertible truth that Republicans refuse to acknowledge that Democratic presidents are legitimate. He traces this back to Clinton's clear - but minority - victory in 1992, through "Birtherism" and on to Trump's outrageous lies about the election. David Frum's observation that as Republicans realize that they can't win democratic election they will turn on democracy itself is looking more and more true.

Last week, when we looked to be headed towards some narrow Biden win at best, my sister suggested that we just break the US up. As the magnitude of Biden's victory - at this point over 5,000,000 votes - sinks in, some of that fever has passed. But frankly, I would love to see about ten states secede, those who gave Trump over 60% of the vote. Let Appalachia secede and the empty red quarters of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Idaho. If 66% of a state wants to secede, they can leave. 

Two things will happen.

First, Democrats will not be burdened by an obstructionist Senate. Lincoln and the Republican Party were able to pass a host of important bills without Southern Democratic obstruction - the Morrill Tariff, the Morrill Land Grant, the Pacific Railroad Act, the National Bank, the nation's first income tax. The dominance of the urban/suburban areas when you divorce the empty red quarters would produce good bills, better laws and a stronger country.

Second, these rump states will fail. Appalachia and the Upper Plains would be poor, isolated and poorly run. Eventually, they will come slinking back. When they do, consolidate them into a couple of large red states. Isolate the madness. Congress can't change the borders of states, but once they secede they become territories and all bets are off.

This isn't about the Coup Clutz Clan's efforts to the overthrow the election to Trump. That will fail. This is about one party delegitimizing the majority will of the nation. The GOP has become the biggest threat to American democracy. All options need to be on the table to save it. 

UPDATE: America has a democracy problem.

Things Are Crazy

 So I'll just outsource the blog to Josh Marshall.

Basically this:

I keep hearing that we need to be worried about a more disciplined, saner version of Trump. I think this totally mistakes his political career. Those aren’t bugs. Those are features. The craziness is his power. No, him leaving the White House doesn’t make everything hunky dory again. But in electoral terms he accentuates things, shifts things in some ways that are unique to him.

Don't Get Too Freaked Out

 There is a sense of doom on Twitter about how the GOP is calling into question the results of last week's election. While a few people like Romney and Collins have congratulated Biden on his victory, we are getting some blazing hot takes from the likes of Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell about "count all the legal votes" and the "President should get his day in court."

This has caused concern, because it is a norm to accept the results of an election, yet we know Trump will never accept his humiliating, crushing defeat (5,000,000 votes and rising). The presumption is that some of his GOP enablers are treating him the way you would a spoiled toddler: assuaging him with soothing words until he comes to accept that he cannot, in fact, get a real helicopter for Christmas. I think that's likely. The real question will come when the votes are certified and the court cases thrown out on their ear, because they are laughable bullshit. Which they are. The fact that US Senators are called into question the legitimacy of an American election that was not particularly close in the end is disturbing. 

The possibility of real damage to our shared sense of democratic institutions is real.

However, while there are certain problems with Trump's tantrum, namely the inability for Biden to manage his transition, it ultimately means nothing. At this point. 

David Frum - Dubya Bush's former speechwriter - predicted that when democracy rejects conservatism, conservatism will reject democracy. I don't know if we are entirely there yet, but we can see it from here without binoculars.  

We Were Saved By Incompetence

 This is perhaps the finest lede in the history of journalism:

What began five years ago with the made-for-TV announcement of Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions from the escalator of his ritzy Manhattan high-rise ended Saturday with his aging lawyer shouting conspiracy theories and vowing lawsuits in a Northeast Philadelphia parking lot, near a sex shop and a crematorium.

When the history of this period is written, the sheer stupidity of Trump and many of his surrogates will take center stage.

The question going forward will be whether a "smart" Trump like Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley will mesh as well with the Trumpenproletariat. Trump's Queens/Fox News bullshit fit like a glove with the Comfortably Aggrieved that make up his base. 

This is an interesting thread about how the Senate got away from Democrats. Susan Collins vote against Amy Coney Barrett likely lifted her over Sara Gideon. Leftists that suggest Democrats didn't do a good enough job running on economic populist issues were mostly not in states that Democrats blanketed with ads about health insurance. They tried.

This is a key point:

Voters in these states reverted to form. GOP internal polling showed that as voters across the board became more aware Biden was likely to win the presidency in the final weeks, it became harder for Democratic candidates to win over the Republicans and conservative-leaning independents they needed to win. The chance to compete slipped away from Democrats in Kansas and Montana. Greenfield’s advantage over Ernst in Iowa ― one poll showed the Democrat winning 10% of Trump voters ― evaporated. 

When we talk about post-Trump politics, we need to account for the fact that much of the country remains steadfastly "conservative." The Blue Wave of 2018 was largely fueled by anti-Trumpism, with independents and moderate Republicans breaking with the GOP and wanting a check on his more damaging behavior. However, the record-breaking turnout was also caused by Trump activating non-voters, too.

Right now, the Democrats' flipping of the suburb and college-educated whites is critical, because they are a fairly reliable voting demographic. If you can solidify the suburbs of Atlanta and Philly, and eventually flip Charlotte and the Research Triangle, then you have a path to Senate control. 

While people are fretting over Trump trying to hold on to power and threatening all sorts of shenanigans, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock should probably hope that Trump threatens to stay in the White House at least through the special election. That could motivate those who are sick of Trump to join with young voters and African Americans to flip those two seats and create a 50-50 Senate. 

When Trump and his cruel but inept cronies exit the scene, there will be an attempt to replicate it among Republicans in 2024. I just don't know if any of them have the juice to do it. 

But those on the Left who think Democrats lost ground in the House and failed to flip the Senate because they didn't run on free college or Medicare For All are deluding themselves. 

Still, I leave you with this from the Fours Seasons Landscaping story, to hopefully make you smile:

But not all in the neighborhood were so amused. The 78-year-old employee manning the counter at the Fantasy Island sex shop, who declined to give his name, said the phone had been ringing off the hook since Saturday with callers asking: “Is Rudy Giuliani there?”

The Interregnum

 We have two and a half months left in Trumpistan. There is some thought he will burn the whole country down in the time he has left. Maybe.

We have to remember that he is a fundamentally lazy man. Son of a bitch was on the golf course when they called the election. That's perfect. The people around him are also stupid and lazy, as witnessed by the fustercluck of a news conference they called yesterday. 

There is no doubt that Trump's rhetoric will be a combination of shrill, baseless allegations of fraud to protect his wee ego, but it will also be a litany of whiny complaints.

Meanwhile, we are entering a world of hurt with Covid. My state has done a pretty good job since the spring in containing the spread of the virus. We just went "red" again. While therapeutics have made Covid much more survivable, we are adding tens of thousands of cases every day. Even with a low death rate, we are going to see a massive spike in deaths in about a week or two. Europe is seeing the same explosion in cases.

Public health officials warned us about this. They said the fall and early winter were going to be bad, and it looks like we are in for a bad time. The new therapies will help and testing in some places is going well. I've been tested five times since mid-September. We have miraculously kept the virus off campus so far, and kids and staff have been amazing about keeping masks on, despite the drudgery of it all. It's no fun, or at least not as fun as they deserve. Still, it's working.

Biden has announced a task force to coordinate efforts to stop the virus. They will effectively be a "shadow government" creating expectations for what will happen in January. Some states will benefit from better guidance, but others will not because it seems clear we have politicized the public health measures needed to clamp down on this sickness. We will have 300,000 dead Americans by Christmas. That's more than died of combat wounds in any war America fought. 

Trump - having been rejected by American voters - will simply slink off to his golf resorts and Twitter feed and let Americans die. 

Assessing Donald Trump

 There's a little bit of CYA at play in this piece, but I think there is an underlying truth here. A lot of handwringing has, is and will go on about polling data and how "wrong" it was, though it might not be as wrong as we think it was on Tuesday. Still, there is no doubt that Trump has activated voters that are difficult to pick up in polls. It's not that they weren't being weighted properly, which was the assumption from 2016. It's that they simply don't pick up the phone when pollsters call.

Back in 2012, Karl Rove had an on-air freakout at Fox over Ohio being called for Obama. This is because they were counting on a certain non-college white voter to show up for Romney. For a lot of reasons, they did not and Obama won pretty handily. Certainly more than pre-election polls suggested. The "missing white voter" became a problem for the GOP. As the country became more diverse and cities moved away from them, they needed to find votes somewhere, and white people was where they had to find them.

Trump became the catalyst for these voters turning out. Biden built on Clinton's vote totals just about everywhere. Joe Biden got 5,270,000 votes in Florida. Clinton got 4,505.000. The problem is that Trump added a million votes to HIS total. Biden is currently sitting on 3,336,000 votes in PA. Trump earned 2,970,000 in 2016, but he's upped that number to 3,308,000 so far this time.

What was and is disillusioning about this is that millions of Americans not only looked at the last four years and wanted more, millions more Americans WHO DIDN'T VOTE in 2016, looked at this and said, Yeah, I want to endorse this. Biden is sitting on 74,443,000 votes nationally - that number will grow - whereas Clinton earned 65,853,000 votes; again Trump went from 62,985,000 votes to 70,287,000 so far. (Maybe some of it was that the pandemic increased the ability to vote, by opening up more early voting, but I don't know.)

Why?

I think there is some reasons that would seem counterintuitive to many left-learning citizens. 

1) Back when the BLM protests erupted across the country, it was striking how much support that they had from Whites. It now seems clear that they only had support from Whites who respond to pollsters. The data that showed that civil unrest triggers a retreat to authoritarianism...actually, that might have proven true. Trump's constant harangues about antifa and scary Black people coming to your suburbs...may have worked. 

2) As crazy as this sounds, I think the raging pandemic and Trump's inept response to it helped him. I know there were conspiracy theories about his own infection, but I don't think that was quite it. The fact is, Covid is very dangerous...and also not. By the time Christmas rolls around, Covid deaths will eclipse 300,000 and potentially hit 350,000. Tough to say as younger people are getting it. The fact is, there are a sizeable portion of people who just want to live their lives and don't care if they risk their health, that of their neighbors and family members in the process. Covid restrictions suck. I'm spending my days in a mask, "teaching" below my expectations of myself, exhausted by the whole thing. A vote for Trump was a vote against masks and kids home from school.

3) There is a profound disconnect between how more educated people see the world and how those who aren't educated see this. My wife and I had a bit of a debate over this. Does going to college make you more open-minded and empathetic? Or do open-minded (and therefore empathetic) people go to college? If you are genuinely curious about the world, is that a product of or a pre-condition to college? I lean towards pre-condition. There is increasing evidence that your psychological profile predicts your politics. Less curious and mentally adaptable people prefer traditionalism and hierarchical authority (especially when their race and gender place them higher on that hierarchy). People endeavoring for a more tolerant, just world are - in these people's minds - "woke" "PC" "social justice warriors." This is a bad thing for them, because the movement to a more just, more tolerant world challenges where they are in the hierarchy they were raised into.

4) And of course, there is simply partisan polarization at play.

The question that will shape the future of this country is this: Did Trump awaken a force in American politics permanently? Or was this simply tied to him as a person? Authoritarian movements are often linked to a cult of personality, and Trump certainly manifested that. For various reasons, I don't THINK he will run again in 2024. For one, he will lose the protection from prosecution on January 20th. He's going to spend the next four years in court, and it will not go well for him. He will whine and whine about it, but Courts don't care. He will also be much older. But mostly his "brand" was based on being a "winner" and a "big man." He's going to lose and that loss will sink in eventually. The coming bankruptcy and seizure of assets...it could get grim. 

So, the question is: Is there another Trump on the horizon? 

I don't think there is any question that there are a host of Republican politicians that will try. The reason the GOP has not broken from this clown is that his voters are very real. The GOP base is Trump's base. They may be college educated and understand that what Trump does is wrong, but they can't say that or they will be primaried by a sentient reddit thread extolling QAnon. 

Trump was a charismatic figure to his followers. His brazen bullshit and verbal cruelty were - in their twisted way -authentic. Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley can try them on, but will it really work? Trump was a TV celebrity for a TV nation. Can Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis tap into that? Or will we have a guy like Tucker Carlson try and re-capture Trump's coalition?

I do think the Georgia run-off is important. A lot of voters were motivated to vote against Trump in 2018 and again in 2020. With Trump off the ballot in 2018, Democrats won swing districts. When he was on the ballot, he delivered the margins to knock off some Democratic Representatives. If that pattern holds, Ossoff and Warnock should benefit from Trump having lost, and his minions staying home. However, will Democratic voters show up for the abstract idea of flipping Senate control? They haven't in the past. Will Trump being off the ballot demotivate Democrats, Republicans or both?

Presidents can extend their influence past their terms in office. Jefferson did; Jackson did; Lincoln did even in death; FDR did; Reagan did. I assumed that Obama would be a similar figure (Dubya disappeared down the memory hole.). If Trump and Trumpism extends past the man himself, we have not turned any corners. We are still left to cope with a white ethno-nationalist movement that will become more extreme as they decline in numbers.

Defeating Trump felt good. He's simply an awful human being who represents the worst devils of our nature. Hopefully his politics fades into obscurity and defeat along with him.

Stick A Fork In Him

 Trump is done. The leads in PA and even GA should keep expanding. I think the ballot dumps coming in NV and AZ will go poorly for Cheato Benito. As we have kind of known for days, Biden will be the next president.

Trump will increasingly say and try to do horrible things. This Stephen Colbert clip encapsulates it well.

But he's out.

Biden is leading by 4,000,000 votes and that number will grow because CA, NY, NJ and IL don't like to count their freaking ballots or something.

We aren't free and clear until he flees the country or is escorted from the White House by Federal Marshalls, but the end - the real end - is in sight.

Yes, It's Nervewracking

 America's drawn out, inefficient, patchwork electoral system is aggravating in the best of times, but when so much is on the line...it's ulcer time.

The Biden camp was telling us weeks ago the election was closer than polls suggested. I figured they were just trying to keep their voters motivated. I was wrong. It was close. Of course, Biden is sitting on a 4,000,000 vote lead that will grow larger as CA, NY and IL finish counting their ballots, but that doesn't matter because America.

Nevertheless, the fact that Biden's numbers people were right about the election being close and are now saying it's in the bag, the fact that Trump is throwing an absolute fit, the fact that the Nate Silvers and Nate Cohns and Dave Wassermans are all saying, "I can't really say that Biden will win Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, but..." I think tells us what the smart money knows.

Biden should win Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania and could win Georgia. The way things are going, I wouldn't be shocked if something crazy happened in North Carolina. If we look at Michigan, it tilted Red on election day, Biden is now leading by 3% or almost 150,000 votes. There is no reason to assume something similar won't happen in Philly/Pennsylvania.

I'm a Democrat. Of course I'm anxious and miserable. Being anxious and miserable is the default setting for Democrats since Florida 2000. Aside from a week or so in November, 2008, Democratic politics has been watching people agree with your policies and then vote for the guys who will try and destroy them. It's seeing the country as a whole turn Blue while the critical battlegrounds stay Red.

In the next few hours we will get massive vote dumps that should provide needed clarity. Until those votes are safely in hand, it's natural (if you're a Democrat) to be anxious as hell. The stakes are too high.

But I think they got this.

Georgia On My Mind

 It looks increasingly possible that Joe Biden wins Georgia. He trails Trump by about 40,000 votes with about 122,000 votes from Atlanta, Savannah and Augusta. Mean a net of about 30,000 votes for Jon Ossoff could force a run-off in that race, meaning that there will be two Senate run-offs in Georgia. The other will feature the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the former pastor at MLK's church. The opportunity to send the first African American to the Senate from Georgia should keep Black voters motivated. Control of the Senate should engage Atlanta's white professional class. The Trumpenproletariat. however, will not have their Mango Messiah on the ballot. 

If Biden wins GA, he's president. But he can win that in PA and/or NV at this point.

Ossoff and Warnock are the keys to the Senate. (Unless they find 100,000 missing ballots for Cal Cunningham in NC.)

A 50/50 Senate means McConnell can't stymie legislation. It's everything.

Broken

 I think Joe Biden wins this thing.

He's winning Wisconsin. He's won Arizona. He should move into the lead in Michigan soon. If he wins Nevada, those states - combined with Nebraska's Second CD - get him to EXACTLY 270. Hopefully he wins PA and GA just to make the point clear.

As Paul Campos rightly notes, it doesn't really matter at this point who the candidate is or what policies they propose, Republicans are going to come out and vote for a Republican, even if that person is a legitimate conman, criminal and incapable of governing the country. Institutional problems like the composition of the Senate and therefore the Electoral College entrench their advantage. Biden will win the popular vote by anywhere from 6-7 million votes, but the actual election is a nail biter. 

Like 2016 and even 2018, the Senate map is just a gut punch. Unless Sara Gideon somehow pulls ahead in Maine, or there are miracles in Alaska and/or Georgia, Republicans will control the chamber and deny Biden everything. Hell, I could see them denying him a chance to replace Stephen Breyer on the SCOTUS, though I would guess they will negotiate a deal. Biden ran saying he could convince Senate Republicans to work with him. Even if he can he really get Murkowski, Collins and maybe Sasse to vote with him on Covid relief, voting rights or tax bills, McConnel won't even bring the bills to the floor for a vote.

The stark disparity between the desires of a majority of Americans and what they want and what our institutions will accommodate is striking.

It's Early, It's Late

 The presumption heading into this night is that we would not know the results on this night. As of 12:45AM, the Times has still not called GA, NC or TX. Maybe there are ballots in boxes somewhere. I know Atlanta hasn't counted its ballots.

But while we are still counting the votes, it's striking to look at how polarized the country is. (I should wait on this, but I can't sleep, so...)

States where Biden looks to win 60% of the vote:

VT, MA, NJ (maybe NY and CT, it will be close) MD, DE, CA, OR, WA. VA, IL and RI...I dunno.

But basically, the states that Biden has currently won, he has won with over 60% of the vote, with the exception of VA, RI, CO and NM.

States were Trump looks to win 60% of the vote:

IN, KY, TN, MI, AL, SC, LA, AR, OK, SD, ND, WY.

Instead, Trump is pulling out narrow victories in FL, OH, IA, likely MT, UT, TX, NC and GA.

Once again, Trump is winning the rural, white states by a lot and losing the ethnically diverse, socially liberal states by a lot.

I've argued that our separation or breaking up as a country is impossible, but maybe it's not. If the Northeast and Pacific Coast are opposed to Trump by 60%, that's enough to spark a secession movement, if he ekes out a win.

I hope Biden wins. And I hope the Red Sea between the coasts secedes and this time...fuck'em. I'm done.

I'm A Fucking Mess

 I realize that Florida is a thin reed to place your hopes on, and things look decent for Biden in NC and OH (it's 9:15), but it turns out I have a massive case of PTSD. I'm nauseous, my heart is racing, I'm convinced everything is going to go to shit.

In 2018, the Blue Wave manifested over several days. I hope that happens here. Right now, it looks like the "Narrow Option" of Biden eking out a win in the Blue Wall, maybe Arizona. They flip a bare number of Senate seats to get a majority, maybe with Harris casting the tiebreaking vote. Legislation stalls. 

Or maybe a Blue Wave builds over the next few days and sweeps out some Senate seats that are too close to call at the end of the night.  All I know is this can't continue. The Republican Party is actively opposed to democratic rule, and yet they manage to win millions and millions of votes. Trump laid bare the nastiest elements of GOP philosophy and it simply did not matter to millions of Americans.

We are looking at historic levels of turnout. That SHOULD mean a massive repudiation of Trump, but apparently it means people who didn't vote for him last time - people unaffected by motivated reasoning - have decided to vote for him this time.

If Biden wins a narrow victory, then maybe we can go back to what was normal (and very bad) in 2012-2016. It should not have been narrow. 

I'm sickened by my countrymen right now.

Whoa

 My town is a red town in a blue state. It's a suburban town of about 25,000 and voting lines are usually pretty short. Elections rarely mean much, as Republicans win all the local offices and Democrats win all the state and national offices. Voter efficacy, in other words, is very low.

Since polls opened early this morning, lines have been out the door and around the side of the school building. I've never seen anything close to what I saw when my son and I stood in lines for 35-40 minutes to cast our votes. Now, Connecticut had "no-excuse" absentee voting, not "early voting," like many other states, and it could be that very few voters took advantage of early opportunities to vote. As of October 26th, roughly 20% of registered voters in the state had voted. That's a lot, but it's not like other states we have seen.

Still, there have been 30-40 minute waits at our polling station (apparently the waits are shorter in the more blue collar, Trumpy part of town, but that's just hearsay in line). That has to mean a remarkable surge in voter turnout. Here, in a town where your vote usually doesn't matter.

The question everyone is asking is about voter turnout today. How many people will vote and will they lean Republican or Democrat? If Democrats can break even on voting today, their perceived advantage in early voting should carry them to a sizable victory. The line today was also much younger than it usually is. Younger people don't tend to vote, again because they think their vote doesn't matter.

Clearly, people are more motivated to vote than ever before. We could shatter turnout records, if what I saw today is repeated across the country.

Record turnout is usually understood to help Democrats. Republican voters always show up, which is why they punch above their overall popularity. So who are these infrequent or new voters? People fired up by Trump? Or - and I have to think this is more likely - people fed up with the chaos and the cruelty of a president whose only setting is "offend."

Still, all our models could be thrown out the window if we have record turnout, which it looks like we will have.

With That Being Said....

 While there is no reason to explode into stress-filled supernovas today, I'm going to be very much stressed tomorrow night. Which is also nuts, because it's very likely that we won't know the victor tomorrow night.

Again, Biden is in a much, much better place now than Clinton was four years ago. It is unlikely we will see identical polling errors as we saw in 2016, and Trump would require a bigger polling error in his favor than he got last time. Biden has a commanding lead.

It's just that the stake are so incredibly high. 

Joe Biden will get more votes than Donald Trump tomorrow, but they are not all likely to be counted. While Trump can't "declare victory" and somehow hang on to power, and judges are not likely to invent reasons why you shouldn't count legal ballots turned in on time...we all lived through 2016 and the disappointing results from Florida, followed by the slow drumbeat of doom from the Blue Wall.

I do think Biden wins the national popular vote by over 6%, perhaps as much as 10%. But I do worry that he will be running up the score in already safe states like CA, NY and IL. 

I just hope the Philly suburbs save us.

Panic At The Disco!

 The perpetual emotional state of Democrats is that of anxious, impending doom. They can't look at any race and assume that they will do well. This largely comes from the trauma of 2000 and 2016. In those two elections, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. In 2000, the networks called - the uncalled - Florida for Al Gore. I don't think we need to go into 2016.

What this erases is 2008, 2012 and 2018. In Obama's election in 2008, Democrats assumed a massive "Bradley Effect" where white voters would tell pollsters that they were "voting for the Black guy" and then behave differently in the voting booth. That didn't happen. In 2012, pollsters over learned the lessons of 2010 and underestimated Obama's support. In 2018, polls showed a strong preference for a Democratic Congress and that came to pass. The voters had a strong reaction to the chaos and cruelty of Trumpistan.

Now, we have a monumentally important election that determines whether America slides into elective authoritarianism. An illegitimate Trump win aided by corruption in the Courts could lead to disunion. People are sweating Pennsylvania again.

Given the stakes, anxiety is perfectly reasonable. However, it's not entirely founded on reality. As I've written here multiple times, the polls were only catastrophically wrong if you stopped reading them in mid-October. The polls very accurately captured the late movement to Trump.

We simply aren't seeing that this year. To the degree that there is some late movement, Biden's lead is large enough to buffer those losses.

Twitter melted down over a Seltzer polls that shows Trump winning Iowa 48-41. Except Trump won Iowa 51-42 last time. In other words, he's lost 3% points. If that holds true across the Upper Midwest, Trump loses the Blue Wall and Biden is president. Iowa is not critical to Biden winning the presidency.

Instead, Biden is reassembling and building on the Obama Coalition (or the Emerging Democratic Majority). Biden is winning college graduates by 20, he's winning women by 16, he's up 34 with Hispanics - if weaker than expected with that demographic. He's winning 90% of African Americans. He's running 10 points better than Clinton did among White Without College. 

In other words, he's added votes in the suburbs and eaten into Trump's margins in the exurbs and countryside. Trump has added no one to his coalition of aggrieved white people. There is also the wildcard of youth voting. In Texas and elsewhere there is strong signs of a growing participation by younger voters who lean Democratic. There is also evidence that Biden winning the 65+ demographic.

Where is Trump's victory? Increasingly, Republicans have signaled that they see this math, too, and are putting all their eggs into the baskets of getting Republican judges to throw out ballots and somehow declare victory before the ballots are all counted. And, yes, violence seems to be an option for them, too.

There is a scenario where pollsters completely missed Trump voters again. Alternatively, there is a scenario where pollsters miss youth turnout or Biden's surprising strength among older voters. While national polls "don't matter" Biden has a pretty clear 8-9 point lead and is over 50%. Trump remains mired with his 43%. Tens of millions of votes have been cast.

Yes, I'm worried about naked corruption in the Courts. But think about how unlikely it will be to see voting stopped on Wednesday. This is the emotional rollercoaster of being a Manic Progressive. If Trump wasn't such an odious troll, no one would be worried about a Democratic victory.

If you haven't voted, vote. If you can phone bank, phone bank. Take a deep breath. 

It's not 2016, it's 2008. Remember this?