Well. Let’s see who ELSE is up this late.
Technically, this election is not over, because a lot of the urban areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia do not have all their votes in, but the problem is, Joe Biden is going to NEED those votes. At the very least, he’s going to need Pennsylvania.
So while there is not – yet – cause for despair, there is great cause for anger and depression.
This is NOT 2016. The Democrats had a candidate people liked, or at the very least didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s negatives. They had a huge amount of early voting, which is at this point the only thing that can save the election. Most importantly, it is that much more damn obvious what an evil incompetent Donald Trump is, and it ought to be obvious that we will not have an economic or coronavirus recovery as long as he’s president, because if he’s that half-assed about dealing with it now, how’s he gonna be when he no longer has to worry about the voters?
And YET, the Democrats didn’t get Texas, they didn’t get Florida. Nor was I expecting them to. But they didn’t get Ohio or Iowa, and they may not get North Carolina.
Worse, the overall weakness of the national results indicates that Democrats probably will NOT get enough Senate races to take that chamber.
And of course while Biden did the responsible thing and declared optimism at the eventual result, Trump – waiting until almost midnight Pacific time – decided to have a little news conference in which he declared that he was going to contest the election in the Supreme Court to keep votes from being counted, since apparently all the votes not yet tabulated are after Election Day even though they were in fact submitted by Tuesday. The childishness of this argument is demonstrated by the fact that the Trump campaign IS still contesting Arizona, where Biden is leading. But then, with Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, who knows?
The only good thing about this is that, as pundits are saying, Trump has been telegraphing this approach for some time, and likewise the Biden campaign has been taking all this into account, which is why they focused on taking the Great Lakes and Pennsylvania from Trump rather than going for big but tough prizes like Florida. Likewise the talking heads on TV have been warning us for some time that it is not uncommon for election results (statewide and elsewhere) to not be resolved overnight, Your Favorite President’s decrees to the contrary.
It’s just that it shouldn’t have come to this point.
I can sort of understand Latinos in Florida coming in so big for Trump, since Cubans and Venezuelans actually ARE familiar with one-party socialism, and unlike either duopoly faction in this country, actually understand why it’s a bad thing. It’s just that right now the party closer to that endgame is the one that wants to control the economy and the borders, with a Maximum Leader who swims in corruption and praises dictators, including Communist ones. What I don’t understand is all the white and black (but really, mostly white) people who by now should really know better.
What the result shows even now is that a critical percentage of Americans – perhaps more than last time – are either too stupid or too fanatical to acknowledge the evidence of their own eyes, even with Trump Virus on track to kill over a quarter-million people in this country before the end of the year.
Even if you don’t like the Democrats, or even if Biden ends up winning, that is a very, very bad thing for this country.
Well… I’m gonna do a few things around the house, and then get to bed.
Wake me up when November ends.