Prime content is available to paid members, please join us
It’s Too Early to Do Post-Mortems on This Election
Discussion
Join our users to read our prime articles
Your analysis is the only thing I’m reading today in the news. Not checking Twitter. Not reading Talkingpointsmemo. Nothing. Just yours.
Thanks for talking/writing. Needed.
I’ve been waiting for you to weigh in. Like pbriggsiam, I’m pretty much avoiding the news. Looked at Twitter briefly, made a couple of comments, but didn’t see much worth waiting around for.
Good decision.
Right now, all any of us can do is wait. I checked just enough Twitter and news to get a feel for where votes were still yet to be counted in some battlegrounds, including some down ballot races. If I read into that correctly, things will look a bit better in a few days. As that old Tom Petty song goes, “the waiting is the hardest part.”
I try not to look but just before landing here I noticed that Michigan and Nevada add up to 22 elect votes. The current tally on Huff Post says Biden has 248. So if math works and we win those two states, that’s it and it doesn’t count on Pennsylvania, NC or Georgia. I hope, I hope.
Fucking called it.
Polls wrong again, if Biden is up by 6% call it a tossup.
Mail-in ballots were going to be a mistake, people should vote early, in person.
Here’s hoping enough ballots get counted to get Biden over the finish line. But, yeah, I call all of this
I’m not sure it is the fucking polls or the way the states, like those three up north, planned how they would do this. I think a 13 year old could plan it better than this.
All three Repub-controlled state legislatures in WI, MI and PA refused to change the law to allow the state’s election officials to start counting mailed-in ballots early, before election day. All because Trump wanted to be able to claim delay in getting a count was “fraud”. Indeed, he’s now making this fascist argument in court.
Now all he needs are his supremes to do the job they were hired for, I suppose, and us poor slobs have to live with another four years of this criminal. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together like it’s supposed to?
Except Democrats now control the the executive branch of all three state governments, and are overseeing the counting of the ballots. Biden’s won Wisconsin narrowly, and Trump is calling for a recount; Scott Walker (of all people) is saying it won’t make any difference. Biden’s also won Michigan. Ballot counting continues in Pennsylvania and it’s increasingly likely Biden will win there. It’s also increasingly likely he’ll have an electoral college majority without PA; Nevada’s premier political observer, Jon Ralston, doesn’t see a path to victory for Trump there. Some great victories are routs; some are not. This isn’t a victory… Read more »
My very first reaction to the tightness of this contest was that the Dem leadership should have listened to you. The suburban strategy simply isn’t adequate. They have to make inroads in rural constituencies if we’re ever going to break out of this national logjam.
Beyond that broad critique, though, I’m waiting to see.
While my rural neighborhood has been red for a very long time, I just looked at the numbers from yesterday and Trump got 79.5% of the vote. By historical standards here, that’s pretty insane. Most Republican Presidents are between 65-68% here. So getting some kind of different message would certainly make it easier on me to just begin to talk to people in my neighborhood. As it stands in the Trump era, I’m just wasting my breath even trying. But I think here the race/saving our white culture message is so deeply ingrained as to be some sort of sacred… Read more »
Is it possible some votes were mail in ballots that could account for the difference?
Not sure exactly what you mean, since we have had mail in voting for many years, and those votes are included in my totals. We had just under 80% eligible voter participation in our county as a whole. 55-56% of eligible voters either voted early or by mail, so about 25% of eligible voters voted on election day. I don’t know off the top of my head what percentage of early votes were mail in and what were early in-person voting. One thing that was really weird to me. My township consists of two precincts; 229A, where I live, and… Read more »
Thinking about that figure of 79.5% of the vote seems very large. So just wondering if that is so high since it doesn’t include mail in votes, Mail in is pretty high this year. So if that is the kind of number you always see then the mail in had no impact.
I think I saw somewhere that the large percentage in north Pa doesn’t reflect the mail in vote, at least not until it is counted.,
Right now, as much as my wife would hate moving (has more to do with serious disability issues), she gets where I’m coming from. My precinct and my state are hopeless. The only thing that changed from the Jim Crow era was that the party labels switched. Figuring out a viable career move in the midst of a pandemic is a bit tricky.
I might be wrong, but don’t you live in someplace like Oklahoma?
If everything goes well, my wife will be retiring later next year, and I hope to retire at the end of 2022. But so much is up in the air right now for us. My parents are both elderly and living by themselves in the local area, so that is a big factor for me. Other than my parents, there are not a whole lot of things forcing us to stay here..
Arkansas these days. Lived in Oklahoma for a few years at the start of the century and moved here a bit of 10 years ago.
Oh, while I’m sure there will be some interest, the fact that Donald Trump (and his Repub enablers of criminality and corruption in the senate) were not decisively repudiated by the failed electorate when it had the last chance to do so pretty much ends any need for a post mortem. I mean, what’s there to say about the Trumpites at this point that any rational person can stand listening to? Their “motivation” is not really of consequence. The main beam gave way and the main hatchways gave in. A major depression will soon be upon us, with Gravedigger of… Read more »
I agree. This election confirmed beyond all doubt that our nation is broken.
I made the analogy above to the battle of Gettysburg: a great victory for the Union at a time of great division in the country. Also, a narrow victory (because it stopped the rebels at their point of greatest advance into Union-controlled territory), not a rout*. To continue the analogy, we still need to secure this victory (count every vote); then celebrate it, and reorganize ourselves for the next round of fighting. Just as in the Civil War, there are more of us than there are of them. Just as in the Civil War, they think they’re tougher and we… Read more »
I like the analogy and I suppose it’s a good (and optimistic) way of thinking of 2020 and the many disasters the election has wrought, most especially the total inability to divest ourselves of complicit non-entity senators like Collins, Tillis and Ernst, who will now shed any pretense of being “moderates”, since the failed electorates in those states thought their actions worthy of another 6 years, while also thinking that the Gravedigger really should retain control of the senate. The problem with the analogy is that the federal government provided the Union troops with the necessary tools to defeat the… Read more »
I find myself wondering how we could possibly have lost those senate races and even to Moscow Mitch. We also lost some house seats so even though we may win the big prize we left a lot, maybe too much, on the field. We need to understand how we get the best candidates. Something is not working to lose those contests when we had so much to offer.
Well, for one thing, Cunningham might have kept it in his pants. Of course, IOKIYAR but that doesn’t excuse him, it only indicts his voters and the media.
Some of those races aren’t even close and probably never were. McConnell won by 20 points, and—given US/Kentucky politics over the past generation—was never going to lose that race. The degree to which *many* of our fellow Americans exist in radically different social, political, cultural, and economic universes than we do is hard to overestimate.
And even at that, on average, two out of every five people you see in the (for example) Elizabethtown Walmart voted for Biden/Harris.
20 points!!! I didn’t expect her to win but 20 points. Why bother?
Behind a paywall, but so discouraging: Emily DreyfussTrump’s Tweeting Isn’t Crazy. It’s Strategic, Typos and All.A network of right-wing operatives and activists — and the president himself — spread disinformation about Joe Biden with one simple hashtag.
How can we combat this when 1st Amendment arguments are so strong? People can’t be forced to tell or disseminate the truth. It’s the culmination of decades of Right-wing radio, but now like a nuclear bomb compared to a grenade.
Exactly. The total (and probably irreversible) collapse of the Framers’ vaunted Enlightenment “Marketplace of Ideas”. The “market” only “clears” when all the consumers of info participate in the same market and WANT to be enlightened. And of course conservatives gorging on today’s rightwing sewage think they ARE being “enlightened”, since truth is now subjective. A solution certainly evades my mind. A shaming and boycotting of advertisers on the Hate Radio networks? A boycott of Facebook by all decent people? Twitter’s attempts at “regulation” are obviously failing. If some rightwing tweet is “flaggable”, why isn’t it just deleted as willful disinformation… Read more »
Thanks for your thoughtful response. This analogy is probably already stretched too far, but it’s not too hard to find people who’ve suffered fates similar to the 1st Minnesota over the last four years: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, the thousands of refugee children separated from their parents, those dead and disabled from Covid, etc. When all the ballots are counted, Biden will have won by 5-6 million votes, Democrats will have retained control of the House, and gained seats in the Senate. Do the right-wing plutocrats, the fascists, and their allies still have too much power? Yes. And so did… Read more »
Well, we *did* save democracy.
Would you consider making this a non-Prime only article? There are people I would love to send this to who are not subscribers.
It’s looking like, once ALL the votes are counted, the polling will be off by 3-4 points in the midwest, and nationally. Like, OH is showing 8% to Trump, but many votes in blue counties are not counted yet. It’s difficult to find consistent themes thus far, and we probably shouldn’t until the final count is in. Trump turns out low propensity voters – that’s for certain. The pandemic hurt our doorknocking and registration, which was critical in NC especially (and probably TX, FL). But when Trump is not on the ticket, it seems the low propensity voters don’t turn… Read more »