First off, as a public service, here are some key election certification dates according to this page:

• November 20: Georgia
• November 23: Michigan and Pennsylvania
• November 30: Arizona
• December 1: Nevada and Wisconsin

On these dates, the election result of the state is declared official. The Electoral College votes on December 14.

I bring this up in case there are more shenanigans about not certifying elections, as in Wayne County, Michigan, last night. The Republican holdouts eventually relented and the county results were certified. I take it yesterday was a county deadline for certification.

I don’t know that the fact of certification will discourage Trump and Giuliani from their doomed quest to flip the election. For a good laugh, do see Here’s what happened when Rudolph Giuliani made his first appearance in federal court in nearly three decades.

See also Charles Pierce, 40 Years of Republican Politics Came to a Head at the Wayne County Board of Canvassers and Paul Waldman, We came much closer to an election catastrophe than many realize.

The big headline yesterday was that Miz Lindsey called the Georgia Secretary of State to pressure him to lose a few Biden votes. The South Carolina Senator protested that his phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was misunderstood, but Raffensperger says other people were in on the phone call and can back up his claim that Lindsey was strongly suggesting Rassensperger start tossing out legal Biden votes.

Jennifer Rubin points out that whatever was said, it was inappropriate for the Senator from South Carolina to contact the Georgia state official about election results.

Graham denied to The Post that he encouraged Raffensperger to discard ballots, saying he was only investigating signature-matching rules. That raises the question why he would need to know this information and decide directly to contact Raffensperger, who is under death threats and has been subject to baseless accusations of misconduct by fellow Republicans.

Chales Pierce:

I have moved on to being angry and frustrated not with the president*’s enablers, but with the enablers of the enablers: the members of Congress and of the Republican political elite who profess to be upset with the course their party has taken but who won’t take their colleagues to task for being a part of it. I am talking here about the Very Concerned Caucus—Willard Romney, Young Ben Sasse, Susan Collins et. al.—who should be marching into Mitch McConnell’s office right now and insisting he take control of his caucus and force full recognition of the results of the election. (Suspending Graham’s chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee pending a full exploration of his dealings with Raffensperger would be a nice touch, too.) Nobody in that party has any stones whatsoever, except Brad Raffensperger, Hero of Democracy.

I am not sure I see the point. Georgia by itself won’t give Trump the election. Georgia AND Pennsylvania together would still leave him short of 270 Electoral College votes. He would need one more state. It’s over. Republicans are wasting everyone’s time and money indulging Trump’s fantasies. And surely Miz Lindsey knows that. Maybe his call really had something to do with the Georgia senate election, somehow.

The latest “evidence” of vote stealing comes from Floyd County, Georgia, a very rural and very Republican place. The hand recounters there found more than 2,600 ballots that hadn’t been counted before, and most of them were Trump ballots. The uncounted votes gave Trump a net gain of 800, which are not enough to make up for Trump’s current 14,205 vote deficit in the state. Even so, right-wing media went ballistic. They have yet to notice that Floyd County, Georgia, is a very rural and Republican place that went for Trump, 70.3% to Biden’s 28.4%. The uncounted ballots were all traced to the same precinct, where county election officials failed to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot scanning machine, says the Atlanta Journal Constitution. But such is the stuff conspiracy theories are made of, and Floyd County, Georgia, will be blended in to right-wing mythology as the place where Georgia was stolen from Trump.

But not all the craziness is in Georgia. This tweet from a nurse in South Dakota went viral.

Going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens. And

— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020

I can’t stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.

— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020

Cognitive dissonance, anyone? In an interview, the nurse, Jodi Doering, said that some patients are in denial to the end. “Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’”

We’ve reached the point at which there can’t be many Americans left who are unaquainted with someone who tested positive. Anyone still in denial about covid is not someone who can be reasoned with or “reached.” I just hope they can be marginalized enough to minimize the damage they do.

David Horsey, Seattle Times

[Note: For stupid technical reasons that were not my fault the blog had to revert to an earlier copy of itself before I wrote this last post. I have a copy, so here it is again.]

Some time last week in all the teevee election commentary, I remember someone said that Trump won parts of the upper Midwest where the covid rates were highest. And this was said in a tone of wonder and disbelief, because of Trump’s incompetent response to the pandemic. But of course that makes sense; it is because those precincts are full of Trump voters that the covid rates are high there.

Here’s a fascinating statistic:

In 2020, Biden won 477 counties that account for 70 percent of the U.S. economy, while Trump won 2,497 counties amounting to just shy of 30 percent of the economy, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, and his team. (A handful of counties are still awaiting final election results.) For Democrats, it was a notable increase from 2016, when Hillary Clinton won counties amounting to 64 percent of the U.S. economy.

The gap didn’t use to be so extreme:

In the 2000 election, Republican George W. Bush won 2,417 counties that drove 45 percent of the U.S. economy, while Democrat Al Gore won 666 counties that made up to 55 percent of the economy, a fairly even split of the economic map.

And here’s the part that tells us something, although I don’t know what exactly.

A Washington Post analysis of Labor Department data found counties that suffered economically under Obama’s second term flocked to the Trump in 2016, while prosperous counties moved toward Obama’s Democrat successor, Hillary Clinton. Contrast that with 2020, when the gaps were smaller, but Joe Biden saw the biggest shift in his favor in counties that saw the fastest job growth in the four years of the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, the largest shift to Trump in 2020 came from counties that saw the least job growth over his term. (Calculations are based on annual averages, and only use data through March 2020, the most recent month available.)

Why would it be true that counties that suffered the most economically during Trump’s tenure would be the ones with the biggest support for Trump? I would love to see data from those same counties to find out if those same voters believe Trump has been good for the economy, and if they believe they are better off now than four years ago, even thought he isn’t and they aren’t. And is there also something about those counties that makes them more impervious to economic growth (like, low education rates)? Maybe the reason those counties have low job growth is that most of the residents are MAGA heads.

There’s always been a big divide between city and country in the U.S. I understand the culture wars between urban and rural areas was particularly intense during the 1920s. The 1920 census marked the first time more Americans lived in urban areas (51.2%) than rural areas (48.8%). In the 2010 census, 80.7% of Americans lived in urban areas and 19.3% lived in rural areas.

Just for fun, let’s look at the latest covid map from the New York Times.

Sources: State and local health agencies. Population and demographic data from Census Bureau.

USA Today, Nov. 14: The Dakotas are ‘as bad as it gets anywhere in the world’ for COVID-19. You might not know that from the map, because on the covid map the Dakotas are mostly white with dark red splotches. I assume the red splotches are  where all the hospitals are.

It may be that at some point in the future the population trend will reverse. Technology is making it less necessary for all employees to go in to the same office. Maybe people will choose to move away from cities if they can telecommute most of the time. Better mass transportation would help, too. Someday.

Anyway — to the question of whether the country can be united and the gaps closed, in the short term I don’t think so. There is no working with people in denial of reality. How much the country was ever united is questionable. In the past it wasn’t so much united as dominated by the white and affluent part of the population. Now we’re finally trying to blend more people in, really for the first time, and it’s bumpy.

Trump’s supporters are nursing humongous grievances, obviously. They are angry. They blame far-away “elites” for their problems. They feel entitled to a life they are not getting, and they think it must be because someone less deserving has butted into the line ahead of them. They feel very, very alienated from the larger, national culture in which they live. I’ve written in the past about why alienated people turn to dictators and fall into cults of personality; see:

• Why There Are Trump Trains (November 3, 2020)
• This Is What Evil Looks Like (April 11,2019)
• Our Authoritarian Moment (April 5,2018)
• Is This Who We Are? (May 21, 2018)

I could go back a few more years. The point is that this doesn’t have anything to do with what we might call objective reality. Trump supporters may be our neighbors, but in truth they are living on a different planet, and I don’t know what it’s going to take to bring them back to this one, assuming they were ever here.

I predict the focus on Trump will fade away eventually. He’ll be very diminished once he has left office, and I don’t think anyone is going to step into the Il Duce role right away. Eventually, maybe. David Frum:

Since the election, some of Trump’s supporters have begun to ponder pursuing a “Trumpism without Trump,” crafting a Trumpist ideology severed from Trump’s self-harming personality and grudges.

There are at least two big problems with this concept.

First, it’s not at all clear that such a thing as Trumpism exists, apart from Donald Trump’s own personality and grudges. Subtract Trump’s resentments and the myth of Trump the business genius and what’s left? Are immigration restriction, trade war with China, and blowing up NATO really such compelling concerns? Are those goals what energized 71 million Americans? Would they energize voters to support Tom Cotton, Dan Crenshaw, Josh Hawley, or Marco Rubio? That seems unlikely. And while there are potential contenders for the resentment vote—the cable host Tucker Carlson, Trump’s son Don Jr.—they cannot offer the myth of business success. Worse, they overdo the resentment. That’s fine for carving out a cable-TV or Facebook-based business. But if resentment didn’t work politically for George Wallace in 1968, it’s not going to work for George Wallace knockoffs in 2024.

It was never about policy. It was never about making good on his campaign promises, since he didn’t. It was about giving voice to rage and permission to act out about it. That’s what Trump did for people. That’s why they love him. And that’s the only reason. Trumpism is nothing but a cult of personality. Trump and Trumpism will fade, but I don’t see that rage and resentment and alienation going away.

The New York Times and other media have called all the states now, with Arizona and Georgia going to Joe Biden and North Carolina to Trump. This gives us Electoral College votes of 306 to 232. I believe these are the same numbers won in the 2016 election — Trump 306, Clinton 232. The vote in the Electoral College was slightly different because of faithless electors.

Trump’s lawsuits to challenge the vote are going nowhere, and now the law firms representing him — and becoming the butts of jokes — are distancing themselves.

Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, the law firm leading the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, abruptly withdrew from a federal lawsuit that it had filed on behalf of the campaign. That followed a similar move by an Arizona law firm that was representing the Republican Party as it challenged that state’s results.

And on Friday, a top lawyer at Jones Day, which has represented Mr. Trump’s campaigns for more than four years, told colleagues during a video conference call that Jones Day would not get involved in additional litigation in this election.

No evidence of fraud has yet come to light, in spite of the tireless efforts of MAGA-heads to create some.

See also Paul Waldman, Trump’s strategy to have the courts swing the election lies in tatters.

Oh, and the pandemic is out of control. Trump stopped even pretending to do anything about it awhile back. Mike Pence, the head of the pandemic task force, went on vacation somewhere.

Meanwhile, more than 130 Secret Service officers assigned to protect Trump are either infected or quarantined, and at least 40 people in Trump’s inner circle have caught the virus, the latest being Corey Lewandowski.

A couple of days ago, David Nakamura at WaPo wrote,

On Thursday, six American service members were killed in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission in Egypt. Tropical Storm Eta made landfall in North Florida, contributing to severe flooding. The number of Americans infected with the novel coronavirus continued at a record-setting pace, sending the stock market tumbling.

At the White House, President Trump spent the day as he has most others this week — sequestered from public view, tweeting grievances, falsehoods and misinformation about the election results and about Fox News’s coverage of him.

It’s not like Trump ever did the job, but now he’s not even going through the motions. He did show up at Arlington this year (unlike, say, in 2018), but other than that he’s been blessedly out of view.

In spite of being utterly disinterested in the job of president, Trump is still refusing to let go of it. The Biden transition is still being denied briefings and resources. At some point Trump’s got to be forced to cooperate with reality. CNN reports that Joe Biden is not waiting for the White House but is setting up an independent network of governors, health professionals and businesses to prepare to take over the pandemic response. That may be just as well, come to think of it.

Maybe, some time next year, we’ll find out what Jared Kushner did with all the PPE and generators and whatnot his crew confiscated.

Trump is still fighting the election. Even today. Quint Forgy just wrote at Politico,

In a new interview, Trump refused to acknowledge that he had been beaten by President-elect Joe Biden, insisting that his campaign’s election-related legal challenges would reverse the race’s outcome and arguing that Americans should “never bet against me.”

The unrealistic prediction from the president, published in the Friday edition of Washington Examiner correspondent Byron York’s newsletter, represented some of Trump’s first remarks to a member of the news media since Biden was declared the winner of the election last weekend.

Chalres Pierce: This May Be the Most Singularly Petty Bullsh*t I’ve Seen in All My Born Days.

There’s supposed to be a Million MAGA March in Washington DC tomorrow. I’m hoping counter-demonstrators stay away and just let the asshats parade around awhile and go home. Whatever violence or vandalism happens will be on them.

If Congress doesn’t act next week to force Trump to cooperate with the transition — well, I’m not sure what can be done. I’m a bit tired of listening to comments about how Trump needs time to “process.” Nobody else ever needed time to “process.”

Trump can still do a lot of damage, if the Senate lets him, but for the most part there’s not much left to the Trump Era but the whimper. Oh, and the grift. I’m sure there’s still some money that can be bilked out of the faithful somehow.

Nate Beeler-Counterpoint

On this Armistice Day let us consider all the awful things Trump might do to shit on the country that rejected him.

There’s a lot of talk of a coup, in particular since Trump is busy screwing the Pentagon. This article at Politico explains:

The firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper kicked off a rapid-fire series of high-level departures at the Pentagon on Tuesday, setting off alarms on Capitol Hill that the White House was installing loyalists to carry out President Donald Trump’s wishes during an already tense transition.

In quick succession, top officials overseeing policy, intelligence and the defense secretary’s staff all had resigned by the end of the day Tuesday, replaced by political operatives who are fiercely loyal to Trump and have trafficked in “deep state” conspiracy theories.

The question is, can these Trump loyalists in the Pentagon conspire to somehow force the military to back up a Trump coup? I don’t see how. The brass hates Trump, and the military is not supposed to obey unconstitutional orders, even from the President. But that doesn’t mean damage isn’t being done.

Tuesday’s exodus led one top Democrat to accuse the administration of gutting the Pentagon in a way that could be “devastating” for national security.

“It is hard to overstate just how dangerous high-level turnover at the Department of Defense is during a period of presidential transition,” said House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith. “If this is the beginning of a trend — the President either firing or forcing out national security professionals in order to replace them with people perceived as more loyal to him — then the next 70 days will be precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst.”

If Trump is destabilizing the Pentagon to set up something, it would more likely be some kind of sabotage by a foreign power. But chances are there is no plan and Trump is just being a jerk.

At The Guardian, Sam Levine writes Can Trump actually stage a coup and stay in office for a second term? Like me, Levine doesn’t think a military coup is likely. But here’s a scenario I’ve seen in several places:

There is a long-shot legal theory, floated by Republicans before the election, that Republican-friendly legislatures in places such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania could ignore the popular vote in their states and appoint their own electors. Federal law allows legislatures to do this if states have “failed to make a choice” by the day the electoral college meets. But there is no evidence of systemic fraud of wrongdoing in any state and Biden’s commanding margins in these places make it clear that the states have in fact made a choice.

In order to make this work, Trump’s less-than-crack legal team would have to find a way to stop the certification of votes in key states, says Andrew Prokop at Vox. If elections aren’t certified by deadline, which varies by state, it is possible for a Republican legislature to overrule the state’s voters and appoint Trump Electors. So far, Prokop says, there seems to be no serious movement in the states to go along with this, but read Prokop for details.

Trump’s attempts to throw out votes or stop the counting (in states in which he’s behind?) by claiming fraud have come to nothing. See the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press for details. So far, it seems the election and the vote counting have been conducted by the books in every state. It’s actually kind of astonishing that more actual hinkiness hasn’t been found. I suspect election officials everywhere realized they had to be extra careful this election.

The most worrisome thing I’ve heard is that Trump may spill state secrets after he’s been evicted from the White House. Bess Levin at Vanity Fair points out that Trump is, by his own admission, $421 million in debt. And a lot of smart people have speculated he’s in a lot more debt than that. It’s not that much of a leap to think he’d sell out U.S. national security for the right price.

“Of course, that might sound crazy and delusional if not for the fact that Trump has spent nearly his entire term in office making the solid case that he’s a national security risk, a threat that would seemingly become more acute once he leaves office,” Levin writes.

Shane Harris at the Washington Post:

As president, Donald Trump selectively revealed highly classified information to attack his adversaries, gain political advantage and impress or intimidate foreign governments, in some cases jeopardizing U.S. intelligence capabilities. As an ex-president, there’s every reason to worry he will do the same, thus posing a unique national security dilemma for the Biden administration, current and former officials and analysts said.

Trump cares nothing about the United States and would sell us all out in a heartbeat for enough money. So this last one is genuinely worrisome.

Mike Thompson, USA Today

A week after election day, a dwindling number of votes are still being counted and few states remain uncalled. They are still counting votes in Arizona, where Biden’s lead is shrinking, and a few media outlets are leaving the state uncalled. However, Fox News called Arizona for Biden on election night. And that may have been significant, no matter who eventually wins the state.

Trump’s plan– which he had publicly spelled out — was to capitalize on an expected Electoral College lead on election night. He would declare victory and then send in teams of lawyers to stop the count of mail-in votes. Nancy LeTourneau writes that Trump was expecting to lose Wisconsin and Michigan, but he didn’t need them to pull off the scam as long as he was ahead in the remainder of the “swing” and red states on election night. But when Fox called Arizona for Biden, the plan was spoiled. “With Arizona gone, Trump would have no clear path to 270 electoral votes,” LeTourneau said.

Over the past week a number of journalists covering the Trump campaign have written that the election night mood went suddenly sour when Fox called Arizona. See McKay Coppins at The Atlantic, When the MAGA Bubble Burst, at the Atlantic, for example. Yesterday Sarah Ellison and Josh Dawsey at the Washington Post added more details about what went down when Fox called Arizona.

Trump erupted in anger, telling others in the White House to “get that result changed,” a senior administration official said. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, phoned Fox News’s decision desk repeatedly. Top aide Hope Hicks, who had returned to the White House earlier this year after a stint at Fox Corp., messaged Raj Shah, a former Trump White House staffer whom she hired at Fox, about how to get the call reversed. Kellyanne Conway got in touch with Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier to complain. Jared Kushner reached out to Fox Corp.’s billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch.

But even as White House officials vowed to Fox executives that they had data from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) demonstrating that Trump could still win, and as all the other major networks continued to hold off on a call, Fox decision-desk chief Arnon Mishkin remained unmoved. Stick with us, he and his deputies told the anchors. We’ll be right. And that was the path Fox News chose.

Since then, while some of its most virulent bobbleheads have continued to push allegations of fraud and irregularities and dastardly Democratic tricks, the news side of the Fox organization has stood by the Arizona call. On Saturday Fox declared Biden the winner sixteen minutes after CNN had done so. WaPo’s Ellison and Dawsey write that Trump appeared to be angrier at Fox than he was at losing.

I doubt Trump has completely given up on the plan to use the courts to flip enough states to pull off a win, but doing so would be beyond messy at this point. The Administration is not conceding or cooperating in the Biden transition. A headline at the Independent (UK) worried me — Mike Pompeo says there will be a ‘smooth transition to second Trump administration’ — but then it appears Pompeo was joking. Maybe.

See also Republicans Escalate Effort to Challenge Biden Election Victory from Bloomberg. My guess is that Barr, McConnell, et al. don’t seriously think that they can overturn the election but are trying to undermine the Biden Admnistration. I also suspect a lot of Republicans are waiting for Trump to signal that he’s adjusted to losing before they acknowledge Biden’s win. Whether that happens before inauguration day is anybody’s guess.

Here’s an interesting story that says Trump may try to cut some kind of deal with somebody before he accepts defeat and vacates the White House.

So what does a former New York City real estate developer demand when 75 million voters, the Constitution, the Electoral College, and 238 years of peaceful transfers of power stand in his way? My friend wonders: “Maybe he believes he can trade for a favorable resolution on his $86 million IRS tax audit. Or a pardon on his New York State investigation. Who knows?”

There has been less acting up by Trump supporters than I expected, although of course they are still all over social media declaring the election ain’t over. And the infamous Q has been silent since Election Day, which is beginning to cause panic among the faithful.

Over the next few days I expect a continued struggle between the Biden transition team and the Trump Administration. However, the wheels of tradition will continue to turn, and the attention of the nation is likely to move on to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Georgia Senate races. My biggest question is whether Trump will actually remain in Washington for Biden’s inauguration or skip town ahead of schedule. I think the latter is more likely.

Nobody Move Digital Art by Barry Kite

FYI, the pancreatic cancer thing was just a ruse so that he could pursue his other career with the Men in Black.

Yesterday, shortly after Biden was declared the winner of the election, my beautiful daughter in law gave birth to a healthy baby boy. A new grandson! So I’m kind of happied out right now. We’ve got some bumpy weeks ahead, but I’ll start thinking about that tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. That’s an order!

I just wish I were in New York so I could dance in the streets somewhere. I could dance in the streets here, but I’d be by myself.

Take the rest of the weekend off and do something enjoyable. We’ll have a lot more stress to deal with before January.

Biden has pulled ahead of Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania, and Business Insider, at least, has called the election for Biden.  That may be premature. It also may be that we won’t be completely beyond doubt in the presidential election until early next week. It’s awfully close. The overseas military ballots probably haven’t been counted yet. Last night, before I changed the channel, Steve Kornacki was saying that it was not impossible for Trump to take over the lead in Arizona. But he hasn’t yet as of this morning.

I don’t want to talk about the Senate yet. It is possible the majority (assuming Biden wins) will be determined by two runoff elections in Georgia in bleeping January. Maybe some nice friendly normal country can invade us and take over before then. Canada? New Zealand? They seem nice.

Some time I am going to have a lot to say about state races and why Republicans did better than expected. Here’s a preview:

In Missouri, where all but one Democrat I was rooting for lost (and that one exception is a Black U.S. House candidate from Ferguson, so … ), the Dems were hammered primarily on two issues — defunding the police and Medicare for All. It didn’t matter how many times the Dems were on the teevee saying they did not want to defund the police and did not support Medicare for All; the Republicans ran ads over and over and over slamming their opponents on defunding the police and Medicare for All. And, apparently, this worked.

The Dems tried to nail Republicans on their support for overturning the ACA and ending protection for people with preexisting conditions. But then all the Republicans ran ads in which they so sincerely pledged to protect people with preexising conditions, even though they have no plan to do so if the Supreme Court overturns the ACA. I don’t think running primarily on the health care issue helped Dems any. Next time, maybe they should just run ads showing the candidates shooting up cornfields with artillery.. That seems to work in these parts.