My final thoughts on the election -
1-in-10 things happen all the time. You will experience odds like that a dozen time by breakfast. A 10% chance that something happens doesn't mean it won't happen.
And ... Donald Trump has about a 10% chance of winning the election.
Ok, that should be enough weasel words and plan B verbiage to avoid various people on the internet telling me I'm a horrible person for giving folks false hope. Everyone I know has either already voted or is living in a state that doesn't matter (presidentially), so there's no chance of this quick blog post causing the downfall of democracy. Karma will just have to look the other way right now BECAUSE KARMA OWES US for all of 2020 so back off and let me be optimistic for a few minutes, KARMA.
Moving on -
Here's the thing to do Tuesday - watch Florida.
Trump has a couple ways to cobble together the magic number of 270 electoral votes, but none of the plausible ones exist without Florida's 29 EVs. If Trump loses that, it's over. If Trump WINS Florida, well, we have to keep watching. . . but not panicking. Winning Florida brings Trump's odds up from 10% to ... 30%. Any of us would buy a lotto ticket with those odds. The odds of it raining in Los Angeles on any given day are higher than that, and people there don't carry umbrellas, so - don't panic if it happens.
But watch Florida.
Florida, that perpetual source of hilarious-but-terrible news stories and somehow every type of national embarrassment, has a few very important things going for it Tuesday - it's a fast-counting state. It's a state that already has a lot of experience with mail-in votes AND it's a state that already started counting them. Weeks ago. The state also accepts almost no ballots after election day, so whatever the case is when the last ballot is cast Tuesday night is going to be very close to the final result.
And here's the kicker - Florida polls close at 8pm Eastern time. That's, like, 5pm for civilized people. (most of the polling sites close at 7pm Eastern, but part of the state has the gall to exist in the Central Time Zone, so we gotta wait a bit for the whole thing to wrap up).
Florida is the state that may plausibly tell us, early in the day, that Donald Trump is going to be kicked the fuck out of the White House in eight weeks. Or less, if he throws a tantrum and runs away.
Most people are watching Pennsylvania's 20 EVs, because it's the most-likely tipping-point state (he who wins it likely wins it all), but PA is a slow-counting state. We very likely won't know PA's vote totals until the end of the week. PA isn't gonna tell us much Tuesday. Florida will. Early.
That's plan A for watching the results. Here's plan B -
Georgia (16EVs) is a quick-voting state too, and I frankly don't think it's going to go for Trump, but it could. The polls certainly say it's plausible. Georgia should be reporting results about the same time as Florida (an hour earlier, actually), and if Trump has lost Georgia he has very likely lost North Carolina's 15EVs (those polls close half an hour later and should release results almost instantly). Losing those historically-southern states would also make Trump's odds much, much lower. So EITHER of these scenarios pretty much mean a Trump defeat - FL or GA/NC losses for him are nigh-unsurvivable.
It's important to note that Biden does not need any of these states. Trump does, but Biden can honestly do without. My "watch Florida, but also Georgia and North Carolina" proposal is JUST an early-celebration thing to let you know you can exhale if it happens. It might not - there's about a 65% chance of either FL or GA/NC giving us good news early on, but that still leaves lots of room for it to not happen. And if both those fall flat -
Still don't panic.
Right now, Trump will lose the election even if he somehow wins every red state, every pink state, every slightly-pinkish state, every tied state, and every slightly-blueish state. JUST the blue and dark blue states add up to 273 EVs and victory, so Trump can't win with just the swing states and red states combined, even if he gets every. single. one. of. them.
BUT WHAT ABOUT STEALING THEM WITH CORRUPT OFFICIALS you didn't ask but probably assumed someone would - Trump probably can do some of that. Republicans have stolen Florida before, and there's no particular reason to think that state has somehow gotten their act together. It's reasonable to assume any Southern state (yes I'm prejudiced) has a vulnerable state government that can be corrupted.
But to steal enough to win this election - he has to corrupt some democrats. Democratic secretaries of state that certify the vote and democratic governors to rubber-stamp it. Corrupting Florida is one thing, but Wisconsin or Minnesota (he would need either of those in all but the craziest of scenarios) are helmed by democrats who aren't at all inclined to fudge the numbers for the red team.
BUT WHAT ABOUT H4CKoRZ your annoying friend keeps posting - Yeah, there can be hackers. And frankly our country SUCKS at this on average, but we don't honestly need to care if Oklahoma's databases get hacked. Let's all just accept that Oklahoma is a lost cause (much love to my Okie friends, but y'all know I left that state the instant I was done with college). Idaho and Wyoming and the Dakotas and Kentucky and so on are also ... just not important if they get hacked. I'll go ahead and call those races right fucking now - they will vote for Trump.
What matters is the states that plausibly could be changed, and have said changes matter, and have people largely be unable to fix them. That mainly means swing states without paper ballots that voters can read, so they will know if their vote gets changed AND later re-counts can prove it.
North Carolina fucked up and went with bar coded ballots, so casting a vote there won't give the voter a ballot they can read and verify unless they are a Cylon. Once that ballot gets put in the box - it's gone forever. Shame on you, North Carolina. You suck at this.
But Biden doesn't need North Carolina. Not even a little bit.
Florida, amazingly, has hand-marked paper ballots. Good on ya, Florida. Georgia's ballots can be read by the voters - Georgia, you get a cookie. Pennsylvania has good ballots - I hereby forgive you, PA, for that time I got a rash in mountain survival school there. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota - all good. Upper Midwest, represent, yo!
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE COURTS says your neighbor, who really should stop reading Facebook over your shoulder - they can't do much. They really can't. We all remember the SCOTUS intervention in the 2000 Bush v Gore recount (if you are too young to remember that, get the fuck off my lawn you whipper-snapper). So think back - how close was it? 537 votes out of almost six million cast made the difference there. The courts were able to kinda-sorta massage that number a bit using arguments that ... they are probably willing to make again. What else happened there? Well, the ballot was laid out in such a way as to funnel nearly a hundred thousand votes to Ralph Nader (his actual support was, let's just say, way lower than that).
I have no faith in our court system anymore, and neither should you (my half-dozen lawyer friends are probably gonna give me an earful about this, but I'm already gonna be hearing from Pete Lee about that cybersecurity paragraph anyway, so bring it on, y'all), but the courts aren't autocrats. Even if they are HILARIOUSLY corrupt, they still need to play the game right. They need standing. They need plausible legal arguments. They need some kind of basis to at least pretend to consider. And, most of all, they need an issue that is close enough to be changed by a small legal decision. Like a gap of 537 votes with a massive cascade of other related issues to lean on when writing those judicial opinions.
That's just not the case here.
WHAT ABOUT VOTER OPPRESSION, I scream into the void every god damn night? Well ... yes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But we have COVID to thank for actually making that way better than it otherwise would have been, because we have been voting for months now. In many places COUGH TEXAS COUGH, dirty tricks like removing voting booths and trying to destroy ballots cast in drive-through stations and so on mostly flopped, and in fact probably made people more inclined to vote. People kicked off the roles didn't just show up to a polling place and find out ten minutes before the polls closed - lots of them have known of the problem for weeks. The Get Out The Vote effort only has to wrangle a small fraction of the day-of-voting population that they usually do. In so many ways, the oppression tactics that usually work to shave a few points off a vote total are going to be far less-effective this year.
Really. We are gonna be ok.
At the end of the day, corrupt officials are a real threat, but the states that can do the most harm largely have decent people running the show. Russian and Chinese and Iranian hackers are all real threats, but again the states that really can do the most damage have some of the best protections. And lawsuits only move the needle slightly, and Trump has already lost most of those. And thanks to covid - much of the country is discovering that us mail-in-vote states have been right all along, and are reaping the benefits of it.
Defeating all those factors to steal the election would take a competent group of very smart people who are very good at keeping a secret, and I ask you - when was the last time the Trump administration hired competent people who could keep a secret?
So - Biden's gonna win this thing. And if the gods truly smile on us, the west coast will be able to celebrate over dinner.
And I'm gonna sleep for a fucking week when this is all over.