Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I am optimistic about the VP’s situation.

I just got done canvassing in Reno for a week. I’ve done that every
2 years since 2010(except 2014 and 2020). This time every list I was
given was 5-10% 18-21 year olds. Mostly women. I’ve never seen that
before. Loadza brand new voters, mostly female.

Trump’s going to get Swiftie Booted.
  

    
>I think the worst President in my lifetime was George W Bush

Who swapped out a majority of the supreme court leading to Roe
vs. Wade being overturned.   Who installed a shitton of RWNJ judges to
the federal system, many who have little, if any experience, but are
willing to support RWNJ politicians.

Not.

Anti-gun people should love GWB, he signed the bill that greatly
restricted the ownership and transfer of military firearms legally
owned by civilians.
  

    
It may be really Harris vs Vance, as you say Oz, but while Trump is
alive he will do much damage in his special Three-Stooges-on-Crank
way.
  

    
I have a really hard time imagining Trump stepping quietly out of
the way.

Exercising the 25th amendment in this political climate is rife with
opportunities for chaos.
  

    
I don't believe in God in any conventional sense, but I beseech any
unseen powers that may exist out there to end the mad rightward
careen that has been underway in this country since 1980. The world
looks to us for leadership, and all we've provided them for 44 years
is a case study in the ways democracy can fail.

Here's to the fever breaking today. May the body politic here and
elsewhere pull out of the global descent into the lizard brain. As
Heather says, these things can happen rapidly. Let it be so now.
  

    
Meanwhile, there are numerous reports on NextDoor to the effect that
businesses in downtown Portland, Oregon (my newly adopted home) have
boarded up their lower floors in anticipation of possible election
unrest.
  

    
Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm one of the WELL's foreign correspondents as
I live and work in London, England (and was born in the UK too, so
no vote for me today). 

I'd have to say that the mood here is best summed up as "anxious"
because most of us can't believe that Trump has even a chance of
avoiding a total rout today let alone polling neck and neck with
Harris especially after his deteriorating condition and behaviour in
recent weeks. We're counting on the Great American Public not to
royally f*** it up today.
  

    
One of the things we should have learned from all this is that there
is a huge pool of resentment on the part of those who feel left out,
left behind, left alone, left to fend for themselves. If the
American public once again proves not-so-great, voting-wise, it can
be blamed on all those lefts. Which is a funny way to put it, since
the left would happily have saved them from all that. But the left
hasn't had much to do with policy since 1968. 

What the right is great at is sticking it to the working class and
then persuading them that the left is to blame. And the left can't
respond very effectively since a candidate who explicitly identifies
as left probably won't survive the primaries, given the outsized
role of money in our elections.

It's a grossly defective system, but not easily repaired.
  

    
For those very few readers who may be watching the returns in real
time (who would do that?), Robert Reich warns of the "red mirage":

> Votes are counted by precinct, and Democrats tend to live in
> more densely populated, urban precincts, while Republicans
> tend to live in more sparsely populated, rural ones. It just
> takes longer to count the votes in a precinct with a lot of
> people than in a precinct with fewer people.

So the early returns tend to favor Republican candidates, but later
returns generate a "blue shift" toward Democrats. In a rational
evidence-based culture, none of this would matter. In our culture,
it provides Trump et al. with a basis to start shouting early about
a "steal." (But at this point, is that like crying "Wolf" one too
many times?)
  

    
Cite:
<https://robertreich.substack.com/p/be-prepared-for-the-red-mirage-on>
  

    
I’m actually pretty confident that Harris has this in hand.

I’m also quite worried about how the network of well-funded Trump
supporters are going to contest her victory.
  

    <scribbled by lperson Wed 6 Nov 24 10:17>
  

    
Vance would be just as bad or worse, but in a different way.
  

    
Every orifice is clenched. I'm afraid that nothing's going in or out
today.

This feels like the most fraught day in our nation's
history...certainly in my lifetime.
  

    
Judd Legum's Popular Information notes that vote counts will
fluctuate (as Reich mentioned in the quote above in <59>), and has
published a guide explaining how those fluctuations will work in
various states:

<https://popular.info/p/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose>
  

    
Britain's politics has been in turmoil recently.

But they still have 'His Majesty's loyal opposition'. 

And we now have 'The enemy within'.
  

    
Jon Meacham has an op-ed about Trump:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/05/opinion/donald-trump-regret.html>

"Given our binary system, a vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for a
democratic ethos in which we can pursue lives of purpose and
prosperity under the rule of law. A vote for Donald Trump puts that
ethos at risk.

....

"The point of our democracy is to debate and to disagree within an
arena defined by the rule of law and informed, ideally, by respect
for conventions that enable us to endure without falling into a
Hobbesian war of all against all. A Harris presidency would preserve
that arena. Another Trump presidency could destroy it."
  

    
Among my few go-to sites for election and political analysis is
electoral-vote.com. One of the reader comments posted today, about
the factors not accounted for in polling, strikes me as astute:

"The rule of thumb is a good GOTV is worth 1 to 3 points. Abortion
should be worth 2-5 pts. Legalized Jane should be worth 2-5 pts, Liz
Cheney folks voting for Harris should be worth 2-5 pts. Among other
things I do not understand is the polls having it 50/50. To counter
all these pluses it means the racism and anti-female slant of the
electorate is 10 pts. plus. If such is true, I am very disappointed
in my fellow Americans."
  

    
Same.
  

    
"F.B.I. officials said unknown people had been circulating fake news
clips and videos using the bureau’s insignia to push false
narratives that voters should avoid polling places because of
imminent terror attacks. The new warning came hours after officials
warned that foreign actors, led by Russia and Iran, were
accelerating misinformation efforts."

Foreign or domestic interference ...? 

<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/11/05/us/trump-harris-election/ddf199d4-ef44
-5220-8620-e082c9b72ca8?smid=url-share>
  

    
>those who feel left out, left behind, left alone, left to fend for
themselves

Are they, though? It seems as though the meat of the MAGA are not
economically distressed, but instead offended about progressive
culture shifts that erode their historical white privilege. They're
certainly being *told* that they are being marginalized
economically, but if so they should be easy pickups for the
Biden/Harris economic recovery. 

It seems to me that their central grievance is that propertied,
white, Christian males enjoy no more elevated status than anyone
else (and complain that "illegals" are the beneficiaries of their
perceived demotion), which to them feels oppressive. They want to
return to a time when women, minorities, immigrants and "deviants"
were subordinate to them, and resent that their own identity silo is
regarded as malignant.

Demographics are coming for them with a meat hook. GenZ is only 51%
unadulterated white, and the next generation will be majority
minority. It isn't that more nonwhite people are immigrating, nor
that nonwhite families reproduce more abundantly. The phenomenon
that fuels this demographic trend is intermarriage. It's not quite
so prevalent as you might suppose from watching television
advertising, which has been casting biracial or multiracial families
pro forma (and including all sorts of multiculti extras, from
disabled and mesomorphic to gay and gender fluid family members) in
all types of product promotions, but none so much as pharmaceutical
ads. But the heart wants what the heart wants, even in small towns
in rural areas, and a lot of people now have cafe au lait in laws
and grandchildren. That has changed their perspective, and made this
cultural shift visible even in Mayberry.

But the butthurt propertied white Xtian males see these ads and the
changes in their own hometowns and see their vision of a nation that
never really existed slipping away. And they see Kamala Harris as
the avatar of that cultural shift, and the Democratic Party as the
movement animating it. It isn't economic opportunity they're losing;
it's social influence. 

They profess a great deal of contempt for these communities, but it
is really fear that animates it. It isn't that they are deprived of
material agency; it's that they are politically (and soon
statistically) irrelevant. 

Blutocrats have prospered by agonizing the privilege receptors of
these disappointed atavists, but as I expect this election to
demonstrate, they just don't have enough noses to count. This is the
election in which they will be dispositively outnumbered enough to
show up in the EV. This explains the apocalyptic rhetoric, and the
draconian policy priorities calculated to compensate for their new
minority status. They know how minorities are treated in this
country, and they want no part of it.
  

    
Reich’s admonition that (druid) posted in #59 is the opposite of
what happens in Nevada. There, the urban Blue votes come in first,
and the Red rural votes trickle in late. In 06, when my cousin was
running for the NV2 House seat, she was up by 3 points at 11pm. The
young pro who was running her operation warned us against getting
our hopes up. The morning revealed she had lost by 5-6%. 

I’m really hoping young voters surprise the Rethuglicans. A genuine
electoral drubbing might be the only thing that keeps the rowdy
right from raising a ruckus.
  

    
Oddly, I can't find that text <sweeney> posted in <70> by following
that link, or by searching online. I did find this:
<https://youtu.be/GvtI1fyIOWw?si=QHCmwsuMkdWbLHOE>
  

    
I believe that people hear that the economy is awesome, inflation
stopped, and they wonder why prices in the grocery have never
returned to their pre-pandemic levels.  They may have a
cost-of-living increase or a hike in wages (or they may not!) but
the price of better cuts of meat are still something like 25% over
what they used to be.  Things that were $2.50 on sale are now $4.50
on sale.  To them, the local grocery now seems like Whole Paycheck,
even if their paycheck is bigger than before.  Things did not revert
to the earlier price structures.

Now this can be explained, but looking at a couple of nice steaks
for $50 is what people encounter every week, and it makes an
impression.
  

    
Jon, it's a Live Updates page, so it has probably scrolled down the
list some now. I believe it was posted around 7am Pacific.