The 2020 Election: Delaying the Inevitable

My best election day result, so far… :fist_right::fist_left:

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Ethiopia seems to have kicked off a civil war yesterday, be careful what you wish for!

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Just a theory, but perhaps this result being somewhat close is actually a challenge for the Republicans going forward as well.

Their base is now thoroughly infected by QAnon, and is only going to get more extreme. If this was a landslide it would indicate that the party could remake itself in a form a bit more palatable claiming the landslide loss as justification for realigning with their voters and core values. But I don’t think this result is going to allow for that. So they are going to be stuck trying to devise policies and values that will keep the increasingly extreme engaged, and still remain acceptable to those closer to the center.

I guess you could compare that to the progressive left issue the democrats have, but at least there is a more functional set of values to align around. Democrats are for better universal healthcare, there is disagreement about implementation. They are for inclusion and diversity, but there will be differences in the immigration policies.

The extreme right and more center right have less of those commonalities I think. The things they are for are really more things they are against, and I see that structure as a bit more of a hollow foundation to build on.

Entirely possible I am just speaking some vague wishy-washy optimistic bullshit here. Its deeply disturbing that QAnon is able to gain such a foothold. But the fact that it is so genuinely batshit crazy and lunatics run that asylum I would assume would make it harder to keep in line, unless all the establishment republicans left completely give the party over to Trump.

Perhaps I just need to sleep more in order to restore to the appropriate amount of complete hopelessness to my thinking…

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I hearted this post for the above only… :grin:

Another sad thing to me is how much this all highlights how our elections are so broken. Not just the way we elect Presidents but the way we vote. Some rando with poor vision and no training in handwriting analysis (if that’s even a thing) should not stand between me and my vote. And I sure as hell shouldn’t lose my vote based on whether or not I remembered to skip the ballot into some sleeve they arbitrarily decided to include with it.

Did some quick math regarding the spreads on the five counties called out in the Georgia tweet.

Simple math on the five counties broken down by AJC shows they should be +57k of the 102k currently needed. Likely more, since these ballots will disproportionately break Biden. Possibly something like +70k.

Beyond that, there are still more metro Atlanta counties, notably Clayton, with ballots outstanding. There’s still a chance.

This is equally important for the Ossoff runoff, which will be huge.

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That needs to get cropped. My bad.

Its probably way too early for a post mortum but you are right, there is zero chance the GOP gets off of the Trump train after this. None. They will double down. God help us when we find out what that means.

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Never in my life did I think I would say this but thank god for Arizona. I will never ever ever curse at a zonie license plate ever again

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In the pre-Trump era absolutely, but nowadays Republicans seem to struggle when Trump isn’t on the ballot. The realignment of suburban white voters, who are a dependable bloc, with Dems has made runoffs pretty close to even EV.

Still a somewhat uphill battle to win both seats, which we desperately need.

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I don’t know what this means, but hopefully not rut-roh:

The New York Times 2m ago

Because of an error in an Edison Research data feed of results, the estimate of the counted vote in Arizona displaying on maps and tables is too high. The actual estimate is that 86% of the vote has been counted.

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“Messaging” is not quite it, I think. You can convince yourself that better messaging will win, but messaging is the absolute easiest thing to optimize, because you can message better without giving anything up, so why would there be low-hanging fruit there?

The subtext throughout this whole thread is that people desperately want to have a country where they feel like they belong and they matter and they contribute to something larger than themselves. I was dreaming of an election where America would say “Enough is enough” and decisively repudiate Trump. Biden won, but I don’t think that really happened. I suspect that a lot of frustration ITT is coming from people who feel the same way.

It’s a lot harder to empathize with, but I do believe that a lot of Trump’s support comes from people believing that they cannot be a member in good standing of the Democratic party without changing who they are or no longer believing in the things they believe in. Most people won’t trade money or better health insurance for their status in their community. Consider Biden underperforming the $15 minimum wage in FL even though he supports it and Trump doesn’t. One interpretation is that the minimum wage is popular because it would help people, but it’s more important to people to be part of the Trumpist GOP than it is to support the minimum wage candidate.

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Seems like a great time for a Bloody Mary…

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https://twitter.com/davidplouffe/status/1323998161044611073?s=21

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I can’t imagine this possibly being good news.

Also, how the fuck did it take this long for anyone to realize this? They were in the very high 90s of votes counted very recently. lol @ these gurus with the fancy interactive maps?

Looks like Trump would still need to take it 60-40 and it’s all mail-in, right? So Joe should be ahead in what’s left.

FWIW, I’ve seen comments from Jason Miller types that the remaining count is Election Day vote. I have no idea. The NYT comment just worried me a little. Hopefully Fox’s decision desk got it right.

Not much you can do when you get bad data, unless it’s obviously wrong. Doesn’t sound like that was the case here. (Also doubt map people would bother checking their data sources beyond verifying that it’s a reputable source)

So bottom line is:

Biden is a lock to win whitehouse

Senate will be 51-49 republican led.

Is this correct?