Tomorrow is election day and democrats everywhere in this fair land are careening from the depths of fear, to the hubris of predicting a Biden landslide, then back to absolute despair. It is an ugly tableau reaching the sort of hysteria you usually associate with the QAnon wankers.
Much of that fear revolves around the U.S. Postal Service and their ability, or willingness to deliver mail in ballots to election boards in a timely fashion. It has never been a secret Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general is Donald Trump's boy. It's also no secret that since he was appointed in June this year DeJoy has been doing everything he can to gut the postal service's ability to sort and deliver the mail.
Now there are tales of scads of mailed ballots laying around on the floors of post offices in places like Miami, FL. In the minds of many democrats every one of those undelivered ballots are votes for Joe Biden. In addition in at least two different cities drop off boxes for ballots have been torched. Then in Texas, republicans went to court in an attempt to invalidate over 100,000 drive through votes in Harris County which is home to the state's largest city Houston.
In this age of COVID and the increased need for people to avoid long exposure to strangers at polling places this sort of chicanery is a real and present threat to the democratic process. Especially since The Big Orange Guy is demanding the count be finished by the end of tomorrow--a feat rarely accomplished in places like Florida under the best of circumstances.
Couple that with a marked increase in pre-election violence perpetrated by both Trump supporters and the police perhaps the democratic paranoia isn't misplaced.
On the other edge the, It isn't even going to be close, crowd is beyond giddy. According to them everything is going to fall Biden's way. Screw those polls that show some swing states within the margin of error, or even Biden behind, Big Joe will win every single one of them they say.
The feeling here is, thanks to the traditional amount of electoral banditry committed by Florida's election board, Trump will win there. In addition, although Texas seems on the verge of turning blue that moment is still four years away. Georgia and North Carolina are also probably out of reach. On the other hand Biden looks solid in both Wisconsin and Michigan. Pennsylvania could be iffy, but odds are it will also fall into the Biden column.
All of which brings us to Arizona and Ohio. It will be a long night in those states for both Biden and Trump, however if the former vice president can at least take one of them--preferably Ohio--he will be the next President of the United States.
That is if Trump's nightmare bullshit about not ceding power is just that, bullshit.
Of course there is no doubt El Don will run to the courts if at the end of tomorrow he leads in say Pennsylvania, but over the next couple of days loses it due to mail in votes not counted on Tuesday. And it doesn't have to be just the Keystone state. He will be suing anywhere there is such a scenario.
As these words are being typed Donald Trump is reportedly putting up an unscalable wall around the White House where he will hold his election night watch party. Both are unprecedented acts and worthy of his pals Kim Jong Un and Vlad Putin. Yesterday he called the mob driving trucks in Texas who tried to force a Biden campaign bus off the road, "patriots." If the election doesn't go his way, the threat of armed violence by his supporters at least feels real.
That in itself is an American tragedy. The last time it happened was after the election of Abraham Lincoln.
And, in the end, that is Donald Trump's only real accomplishment as President. He has inflamed and divided us so profoundly it has brought us to the brink of post election violence and perhaps a second civil war.
sic vita est
11-2-20
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