Three Days Later, It’s Still Tuesday Night
The election that won’t end
November 6th, 2020
I imagine millions of other people are doing the same thing I’ve been doing today. Oh, not working with a friend on the siding and enclosure on my porch, or getting my flu shot, or ordering the T-day turkey and special ordering a leg of lamb for the Solstice. Those were just the distractions.
Every hour or so, I would pull up the electoral map on my computer or my phone, sometimes just to see if any of the pale states had switched from rose to powder blue, or [gawd forbid] the other way. About every third time, I would pull up the vote totals and compare the changed tallies to the distance between the candidates, and do a rough estimate on who might be ahead when all the ballots are tabulated.
There’s five states everyone is watching right now. Nevada, which is a crap shoot, fittingly enough. Arizona had been called for Biden, but that might be premature as votes come in from Maricopa county and the consistent 59% for Trump suggests a virtual tie when the counting stops. North Carolina is close enough to be interesting but will, I believe, remain in the Trump column.
People are thinking of the Ray Charles song. Georgia is very much on everyone’s mind. If it were THE deciding state this year, it would be in the role of Florida in 2000. At this hour, only 1,720 votes separate the candidates, with about 50,000 left to be counted. But people aren’t watching Georgia all that closely. Hanging chads and improper Supreme Court decisions may lay in Georgia’s future, but that’s something for another day, a battle that might be fought after other battles are decided.
But in the end, Pennsylvania is the state that will decide this. Biden now leads by 25,000 votes with about 300,000 to be counted. And those outstanding votes are all from precincts that normally are heavily Democratic. Pennsylvania by itself can put Joe Biden over 270 electoral votes, and make the vote counts in the other four states still being contested moot.
Nobody expected it to be this close. I warned people that when they went to bed Tuesday night, Donald Trump might be leading, but not to panic because the mail-in ballots had to be hand counted. I figured we would know who won by Wednesday afternoon, evening at the worst. And I expected it to be Biden, by a comfortable margin.
Where I blew it—where nearly everyone blew it—was in underestimating the number of people willing to throw away all ethics and common sense and vote for Trump. He got 62 million votes in 2016, which was pretty disgraceful. Surely, I assumed the past four years wouldn’t attract any new voters for Trump. I looked at the voting rate and turnout and assumed (correctly) that Biden would get nearly 75 million votes—by far the most any candidate has ever received. I further assumed Trump would get about 62 million votes. His presidency has been shameful and catastrophic. How could he even keep the people who voted for him the first time?
Trump will finish with nearly 70 million votes, an astonishing indictment of nearly 20% of the American population.
The good news is that even right wingers will have trouble claiming that liberals jiggered the vote in some way. Voter suppression obviously failed, no matter which side you think was engaging in it, and if liberals were controlling the vote somehow, McConnell sure as fuck wouldn’t have won.
Yes, I knew that about 42% of Americans proudly and loudly self-identified as deplorable. I always assumed that a lot of them were just enjoying taking a dig at the rest of us, and most realized the damage Trump and his cronies were doing.
I overestimated the intelligence and morality of American voters by some ten million votes. Most Trump supporters really are swine. They love the lies, the chaos, the cruelty. Kids in cages? No problem. Just point to a handful of brief incidents ten years before and say Obama did it too, because jaywalking and murder are pretty much the same thing. People dying from COVID. Just some blacks in the cities. Who the fuck cares? And when COVID inevitably spread to Trump country, it a) was a hoax and b) a liberal conspiracy to kill decent hard-working Trumpkins. Destroying freedom and democracy? Freedom just means ideas Trumpkins don’t like and Democracy means people with those ideas might get elected. Much better to cheat, lie, steal and rob in the name of Donald and Jesus.
Biden is going to win this. McConnell and his few toy Nazis in the Senate might paralyze the government and hope the utter destruction of America will result in people embracing fascism, but we’ll deal with that in January. But McConnell looks like a dying man. He may solve the problem he presents to America on his own.
For now, we just have to clean that moral disease out of the White House.
And to everyone who voted for Trump after all we’ve seen and heard over the past four years: Fuck you. You’re shit Americans and crap human beings. I just hope you live to see how vile you’ve become.
