5th November 2020, 5:15 PM
Gah, Tuesday was such a horrible, horrible day... like, I knew we'd probably win in the end -- the mail-in vote in states not allowed to start counting until election day obviously will take quite some time to count, and by that evening it was clear that in the end our victory was very possible -- but still, seeing those giant numbers we'd have to make up, particularly in PA, sure did not feel good. (Fox and the AP's Arizona call was awesome though, though we still don't know if Biden will hang on and win the state, it's close...) I did not get much sleep that night. We're winning, but Trump did it again, he got a lot of people to the voting booths who most pollsters totally missed. I think the analysis that this shows that Hillary actually ran a pretty good race is accurate -- it's not that she messed up badly, it's that Trump has a special ability to get people to vote who pollsters miss. He is a right-wing authoritarian, part of the wave of them that has swept many countries around the world this century, and they are hard to defeat. Very hard to defeat. Defeating incumbent presidents is also very difficult, it's only happened four times in the last century! But anyway, Trump's unnoticed-by-polling "quiet Trump" voters showed up again, which is why polling was so badly off. This happened in 2016, it didn't happen in 2018 since he was not on the ballot, and now it's happened again in 2020. That is not a cooincidence. And so, things are a lot closer than we thought they would be, and instead of gaining seats in the House we are losing them, though thankfully we WILL keep control of the house.
The good news is, Democrats realized that this might be hard and picked the absolute best possible candidate for the job of defeating this formidable (despite how unintelligent and childish and corrupt and destructive to government and everything else) incumbent. Would anybody else in our PARTY have won this election? I am honestly not sure. Bernie would have been crushed, and sadly my primary pick Warren would have been too. Right now the Democrats' only path to victory runs through the PA/WI/MI region; we can get support from other areas, as Biden has done with GA and probably AZ, but that is the core and we do not have a replacement for them yet. I get why this frustrates many people because those states have gotten redder and are not representative of the new Democratic voter, but until we can get rid of the horrible abomination that is the electoral college we have no choice. And so, Dems did the right thing, picked the guy who can win in those three states, and he did exactly that job. It's extremely impressive stuff.
And once the counting finishes and we see that Biden won by winning away from Trump's 2016 map MI, WI, PA, GA, NE-2, and hopefully AZ? With only maybe a D+4 electorate, half the Democratic lead that polling had been showing? Yeah, we see just how well Biden did.
Now, that is in no way downplaying our failures. Losing seats in the House is bad, and failing to take the Senate back far, FAR worse. McConnell being enabled to continue making our lives miserable is an awful fate indeed, particularly when we have so many things that very badly need to get done. I don't know how we get those things done now, there's only so much you can do with executive actions. The only path to 50 now runs through winning both of the Georgia Senate runoffs in early January, but as well as Biden has done there winning those will be crazy hard, I hope it happens but won't be counting on it. I am ashamed for the people in my state who voted for Biden and Collins, shame on you! We very VERY badly needed that seat... taking serious action against climate change alone is something that needs congressional action and will be extremely hard to get past MecConnell, and this must hapopen NOW. I know you can do a lot through the executive branch -- see what Trump has done -- but still, it's disappointing.
Even so, for that to be our problem, we're doing pretty well -- obviously I would take that every day of the week over more Trump. But thankfully America was just smart enough to reject this autocrat-loving wannabe dictator and vote him out of power. As bad as the failure in the Senate is, I am somewhat proud for this nation; again, defeating successful right-wing populist leaders in the 21st century, globally, does not happen often. Thank goodness for Joe Biden running for president.
The good news is, Democrats realized that this might be hard and picked the absolute best possible candidate for the job of defeating this formidable (despite how unintelligent and childish and corrupt and destructive to government and everything else) incumbent. Would anybody else in our PARTY have won this election? I am honestly not sure. Bernie would have been crushed, and sadly my primary pick Warren would have been too. Right now the Democrats' only path to victory runs through the PA/WI/MI region; we can get support from other areas, as Biden has done with GA and probably AZ, but that is the core and we do not have a replacement for them yet. I get why this frustrates many people because those states have gotten redder and are not representative of the new Democratic voter, but until we can get rid of the horrible abomination that is the electoral college we have no choice. And so, Dems did the right thing, picked the guy who can win in those three states, and he did exactly that job. It's extremely impressive stuff.
And once the counting finishes and we see that Biden won by winning away from Trump's 2016 map MI, WI, PA, GA, NE-2, and hopefully AZ? With only maybe a D+4 electorate, half the Democratic lead that polling had been showing? Yeah, we see just how well Biden did.
Now, that is in no way downplaying our failures. Losing seats in the House is bad, and failing to take the Senate back far, FAR worse. McConnell being enabled to continue making our lives miserable is an awful fate indeed, particularly when we have so many things that very badly need to get done. I don't know how we get those things done now, there's only so much you can do with executive actions. The only path to 50 now runs through winning both of the Georgia Senate runoffs in early January, but as well as Biden has done there winning those will be crazy hard, I hope it happens but won't be counting on it. I am ashamed for the people in my state who voted for Biden and Collins, shame on you! We very VERY badly needed that seat... taking serious action against climate change alone is something that needs congressional action and will be extremely hard to get past MecConnell, and this must hapopen NOW. I know you can do a lot through the executive branch -- see what Trump has done -- but still, it's disappointing.
Even so, for that to be our problem, we're doing pretty well -- obviously I would take that every day of the week over more Trump. But thankfully America was just smart enough to reject this autocrat-loving wannabe dictator and vote him out of power. As bad as the failure in the Senate is, I am somewhat proud for this nation; again, defeating successful right-wing populist leaders in the 21st century, globally, does not happen often. Thank goodness for Joe Biden running for president.