Joe Biden may go over the 270 threshold today. Assuming Arizona really is in the bag — there is some sort of disagreement going on; some sources have called it, others haven’t — Biden just needs one more state, and it could be Nevada. It could be Georgia, as Biden is only 14,765 votes behind Trump, and as of an hour ago there were 60,000 votes left to count. It’s also possible Biden will overtake Trump in the counting in Pennsylvania; it gets closer and closer. But all Biden really needs now is Arizona and Nevada. And then there will be court challenges and recounts, but I trust the secretaries of state have taken care to be ready for that.

Trump’s supporters are being whipped into a frenzy of outrage with all manner of propaganda about the election being stolen from Trump. And we knew this was coming. In Pennsylvania, some local Republican officials are refusing to count absentee ballots and instead are putting them aside for the presumed court challenge. Trump supporters have swarmed election offices in Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada to try to disrupt the vote count. So far, the counting has continued. One might reflect upon the logic of Trump’s people stopping the count while Biden is ahead, but whatever. At least, so far, my worst fears of goons with guns taking over election offices and destroying ballots hasn’t come to pass. Yet.

Have you heard about #SharpieGate? This was news to me, but some wingnuts in Arizona started a rumor that ballots marked with Sharpies instead of ballpoint pens were invalid, and a lot of poll workers were handing out Sharpies to Trump voters. How the poll workers could sort the Trump from the Biden voters was not explained. Of course, there is no problem whatsoever with ballots marked with Sharpies.

It’s unfortunately the case that a Biden victory will not wipe out the Trump cult or QAnon or the rest of the craziness pulling out country down a rabbit hole. I fear we are in for a lot more hurt and stupid in the months and years ahead. I’d consider leaving the country if I could get a passport that other habitable places would accept.

What happened last night was pretty much what was predicted by many, but that doesn’t make it any easier. We were told we wouldn’t have a winner on election night, and we didn’t. We were told Trump would claim victory and threaten to use the courts to stop the vote counting. And that’s what happened.

However: I’ve updated my Excel file tallying the Electoral College votes, and by my calculation if Biden wins Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, he’s got 271 votes. Maine splits its 4 Electoral College votes, and he could lose one and get to 270. And Biden is ahead in all those states right now, although it’s close in some of them.

Yet to be called are Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Trump is leading in those states, but the mail-in votes are still being counted, and those tend to be for Biden (well, except maybe in Alaska). But if we give Trump Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, he’s still short — 267. He still needs to get one of the states in which Biden is leading. And Trump really needs Pennsylvania to win, or else he has to take Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, or some other combination of the remaining states in which Biden is leading, which doesn’t seem likely.

The teevee people are saying there won’t be any updates from Nevada until tomorrow. Pennsylvania isn’t going to be counted until the end of the week, I suspect. We may not have to wait for Pennsylvania, however. The rest of the states may be called by the end of the day.

I’m more worried about the Senate. Let’s hope the blue shift comes through for Gideon in Maine, Cunningham in North Carolina, Ossoff in Georgia, and Peters (an incumbent) in Michigan. We need three out of four of those, assuming Biden wins and makes Kamala Harris the tie-breaker. The other Georgia Senate seat will be settled in a January 5 runoff between Democrat Warnock and Republican Loeffler, so if we’re one short there’s still a shot, but I’d hate to wait until January.

So that’s where we are this morning.

Update: Wisconsin is called for Biden; Trump says he will ask for a recount. The Associated Press called Arizona for Biden, so I’m putting Arizona in Biden’s tally. Three of four of Maine’s EC votes are called for Biden; the other vote is still out. Biden just needs Michigan and Nevada, and he’s at 270.

6:30 CST. I see that the Associated Press has called Vermont for Biden and Kentucky for Trump. MSNBC has called Indiana for Trump. Right now the crew at MSNBC are wringing their hands over Florida, which is a tossup.

6:45 CST. Somebody called West Virginia for Trump. Somebody called Virginia for Biden. Florida is not looking good, but it’s not over.

7:00 CST. A bunch of states. No surprises. It looks like Trump will get Florida.

7:16 CST. Mitch McConnell wins re-election. Damn. Kentucky should secede.

8:23 CST. We aren’t going to get a lot of critical states tonight, especially Pennsylvania, but I am still hoping for a strong indication that we’re in okay shape. I am trying hard not to look at states that are way early in their counting. Four years ago I knew by around 10 pm that Clinton was going to lose.

8:28 CST. Hickenlooper wins in Colorado! There’s one Senate seat flip to the Dems.

9:24 CST.  Doug Jones lost in Alabama.

9:36 CST. I could be wrong — I am wobbly with numbers — but by my calculations if Biden wins every state Clinton won in 2016 and also picks up Wisconsin and Michigan, that gets him to 259. He needs at least one more big state.

9:57 CST. Lindsey Graham wins. Damn.

10:11 CST. Oh, yuck, the worthless Governor Parson got re-elected in Missouri. Damn shame.

10:32 CST. We may not get any more results this evening, so I’m going to call it quits for a bit. Keep the faith.

10:55 CST. Somebody called Arizona for Biden, which is the first flip from 2016. Okay, now I am getting some sleep.

The recent phenomenon of swarms of cars and trucks flying Trump banners deserves comment, especially after hearing more stories about how these meatheads are threatening mayhem and blocking roads. It also makes me wonder how such bullying demonstrations of force are supposed to persuade anyone to vote for Trump. I like words; I like to hear about policy and values and such from my candidates. Force alone doesn’t appeal to me.

But then, I’m not a Trump supporter, am I?

Something I wrote last year about Trump supporters:

[M]any of our great social observers and philosophers — Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer, Hannah Arendt — have long noted that alienated and insecure people easily surrender their own ego-identities and autonomy to mass movements and authoritarian strongmen. People march blindly into mass movements because the group provides something the individual feels is lacking in himself. Trump, to his fans, is a larger-than-life being of great power and certitude. By surrendering their autonomy to him, they feel that they absorb that power. Through Trump, they find connection, strength and a sense of belonging. The baffling, ambiguous world becomes a place of absolute clarity, with bright lines between good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lies, all as defined for them by Trump.

Something I wrote nearly four years ago, shortly after the 2016 election:

But the other thing we need to keep in mind is that people are drawn into authoritarianism by feelings of alienation and helplessness. The psychologist/philosopher Erich Fromm, who escaped Nazi Germany, saw this first hand:

“We have seen, then, that certain socioeconomic changes, notably the decline of the middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital, had a deep psychological effect… Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position. It mobilized its emotional energies to become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of German imperialism.”

…“It was the irrational doubt which springs from the isolation and powerlessness of an individual whose attitude toward the world is one of anxiety and hatred. This irrational doubt can never be cured by rational answers; it can only disappear if the individual becomes an integral part of a meaningful world.”

We all have a deep need for a sense of connection to others and belonging to whatever society we are planted in, Fromm said. People who are jerked around and treated as disposable cogs for too long are likely to lose that sense of connection or belonging. And then they are likely to give themselves to an authoritarian dictator, because through him they think they will find power. That’s really what Trump was promising — stick with me, and you’ll share in my power. The system won’t kick you around any more.

The system kicks nearly all of us around these days; even most white people. Possibly the biggest difference between whites who flock to Trump and those who don’t is that those who don’t have the education and intellectual capacity to see the bigger picture and have some idea how the system is turning us all into serfs. All but that tiny minority at the very top, of course.

I stand by that four-year-old post, btw.

At The Atlantic, law professor Gregory Hill writes about how vehicular mayhem is becoming the preferred form of violence by the U.S. Right.

In a 102-day period following George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police, the terrorism researcher Ari Weil identified 104 vehicle-ramming attacks that had been committed against protesters. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the perpetrators were extremists on the far right whose acts of violence were cheered online. Police officers have also driven their vehicles—in some cases SUVs or cruisers fitted with bull bars—into protesters around the country. A few attacks have allegedly been perpetrated by left-wing extremists, too. The preeminent site of violent political conflict this year has been the street, and cars have joined firearms as weapons of choice.

Unlike people who commit gun violence, drivers who hit people benefit from a certain ambiguity: Did the driver mean to run over those protesters—or just not see them? Was the driver acting out of fear? Why were the protesters in the street in the first place?  In the United States, drivers may face little accountability even for fatal crashes. Even in deep-blue New York City, one study found that more than 93 percent of hit-and-run drivers who killed their victims were not charged with any type of homicide; far more often, the incident isn’t fully investigated, the driver simply can’t be identified, or authorities treat the crash as a traffic infraction and issue a traffic ticket or file no charges at all.

Being in a truck or car also provides an illusion of anonymity. One is surrounded by metal, and behind windows, and how often do we notice normally nice people becoming complete assholes when behind a wheel? 

Why does driving turn so many of us into asshats? It’s not merely the rage aspect. We’re constantly doing socially inappropriate things when we’re inside our mobile bubbles. We cut in line, steal parking spots, fail to use our turn signals, and move ahead at a stop sign when it’s not our turn. We engage in aggressive and risky maneuvers that put our lives—and those around us—at risk.

This happens in part because cars exist in a social netherworld somewhere between public and private space. “When we’re in the car we often feel anonymous,” said Erica Slotter, a social psychologist at Villanova University. “That feeling of anonymity can sometimes mean that we behave in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise because we’re less likely to be held accountable.”

So, the “Trump trains” of trucks and cars make logical sense. These are people surrendering their individuality to Lord-God Trump, and being in vehicles make that surrender even more tangible.

I will probably come back and post something later tonight when we’ve got a few results. Don’t forget that it’s likely the early results will favor Trump; the blue shift is likely to come later. Stay safe, and keep breathing.

Yes, I’m still here. But until the polls are closed tomorrow I don’t want to write about the polls or the election and what stupid/despicable thing Donald Trump has done in the past few hours, and that’s pretty much what’s in the news.

This week is likely to be a roller coaster, at best. We may still be waiting for results this time next week. My worst fear is that Trump’s thugs will break into election offices and destroy ballots before they are counted, but maybe it won’t come to that.

As the header says, feel free to say whatever is on your mind.

I am not going to write about polls any more, at least until Tuesday night. Here’s some music.

You may have heard that police broke up a peaceful get out the vote rally yesterday in North Carolina. See Julia Craven, North Carolina’s Police Attack on Election Marchers Had a Long History Behind It: A racist sheriff and a system of voter suppression meet in a cloud of pepper spray at Slate.

See also Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters?

A few weeks ago I wrote about the county mask mandate where I live now and the many people who turned out to protest it. The police had declared they would not enforce the mandate. Even so, I started seeing a lot more people wearing masks, so I thought we’d made some progress. But maybe not.

This week the county health director resigned. However, I didn’t know until yesterday that she and her family had received threats and harassment. I learned about the threats and harassment only because it was reported in St. Louis media; the local newpaper didn’t bother to mention it.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Elliott was looking forward to tackling issues such as opioid addiction, lead poisoning and childhood trauma with her staff of nearly two dozen employees.

She did not expect that within a few months her small health department about an hour south of St. Louis would be overwhelmed with fighting a pandemic. But what has been even more surprising are the threats and harassment she and her family have faced as she works to protect her community.

It turns out that Elliott is the 12th local health director to resign in Missouri since the pandemic hit, according to Kelley Vollmar, chair of the Missouri Association of Local Public Health Agencies. Vollmar also has been threatened.

Vollmar said she has experienced harassment being a director as well. As a domestic violence survivor, she had worked to keep the location of her home private, but people searched her tax records, divorce records, committees she’s served on and posted information online to determine where she lived, she said. …

… A gun shop owner in the county uses his Facebook page to attack her credibility, warning that gun owners will “decide they’ve had enough of the lies.” Someone, she said, called her husband saying she was out with another man. People posted pictures of her on social media, altered to make her look like Adolf Hitler or comparing the health department to Nazis.

I’m assuming most of these thugs are Trump supporters. So our real-world brownshirts who support the fascist dictator wannabe Trump ridicule a health director by comparing her to a Nazi. Work that one out. Not exactly geniuses, these folks.

The Post-Dispatch article goes on to discuss health directors and other officials around the country who have been threatened and harassed for doing their jobs and trying to keep people safe. These thugs live among us, and they aren’t going to evaporate if Donald Trump loses the election.

Yesterday the U.S. reported a world record of more than 100,000 COVID-19 cases in single day. We’re Number One!

St. Francois County is currently averaging 65 new cases of covid per 100,000 residents per day. Most of the people I know here are over 65, and a lot of them have been pretty much housebound since last spring to stay safe from the pandemic. And the county mask mandate has expired and will not be renewed.

If we can get through the next few days without widespread violence related to the election, we’re going to be extremely lucky.

“Militia groups and other armed nonstate actors pose a serious threat to the safety and security of American voters,” said the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nonprofit organization that researches political violence and has tracked more than 80 extremist groups in recent months. The project’s report said Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon “are at highest risk of increased militia activity in the election and post-election period.”

Unfounded rumors spreading in right-wing circles on Facebook and throughout conservative media have fixated for weeks on the notion that civil war is nigh. The longtime radio and TV commentator Glenn Beck has plied his millions of followers with the idea that the left has an Election Day “playbook” for civil strife.

“The Left” has no such “playbook.” This is not to say that no U.S. leftie ever committed an act of violence, but the Left right now just wants people to vote and for the votes to be counted. It’s the Right that is much more likely to disrupt the election. See, for example, Self-Proclaimed ‘Proud Boy’ Arrested for Threatening to Blow Up North Dakota Polling Place: Police.

And this:

In Michigan, two right-wing operatives were charged with voter intimidation after robocalls that falsely warned that the names of mail-in voters would be placed in a public database used for arrest warrants and debt collection.

I’m not sure what’s to be done with this situation. It’s going to be with us for a long, long time.

Update: This just reported.

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign canceled a Friday event in Austin, Texas, after harassment from a pro-Trump contingent. …

… But when the Biden campaign bus drove to Austin, it was greeted by a blockade of pro-Trump demonstrators, leading to what one Texas House representative described as an escalation “well beyond safe limits.”…

… Historian Dr. Eric Cervini was driving to help with the Biden campaign stop when he filmed a line of pickup trucks along the highway, many of them flying Trump flags. The drivers were “waiting to ambush the Biden/Harris campaign bus as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin,” Cervini tweeted.

“These Trump supporters, many of whom were armed, surrounded the bus on the interstate and attempted to drive it off the road,” he alleged. “They outnumbered police 50-1, and they ended up hitting a staffer’s car.” …

… Footage from a CBS affiliate in Austin shows Trump supporters with signs and bullhorns surrounding the bus when it parked, with one person screaming that Biden was a communist.

This is a traffic violation and attempted homicide. Why hasn’t anyone been arrested? pic.twitter.com/QnfF4vXMQn

— haunting student debt owners (@mcbyrne) October 31, 2020

Armed protesters against pandemic safety measures rally at the state capitol in Lansing, Michigan on April 15, 2020.

Thanks for all those memories.

As anxious as most of us are now, It might be worse next week. There’s a long article by Ron Suskind at the New York Times that I’ve been encouraging people to read all the way through, if they can. I realize not everybody subscribes, so here’s just a bit:

Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll [Trump] want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.

They are loath to give up too many precise details, but it’s not hard to speculate from what we already know. Disruption would most likely begin on Election Day morning somewhere on the East Coast, where polls open first. Miami and Philadelphia (already convulsed this week after another police shooting), in big swing states, would be likely locations. It could be anything, maybe violent, maybe not, started by anyone, or something planned and executed by any number of organizations, almost all of them on the right fringe, many adoring of Mr. Trump. The options are vast and test the imagination. Activists could stage protests at a few of the more crowded polling places and draw those in long lines into conflict.

A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe. Some enthusiasts may simply enter the area around a polling location to root out voter fraud — as the president has directed his supporters to do — taking advantage of a 2018 court ruling that allows the Republican National Committee to pursue “ballot security” operations without court approval.

Trump supporters, of course, fervently believe that everyone who isn’t a Trump supporter is part of some demonic, anti-American subversive force who must be stopped from voting. And since we may not know a winner until the end of the week, if not longer, there will be plenty of time for the hotheads to get out of control.

Still, some states will be called on election night, which might tell us which way the wind is blowing. FiveThirtyEight has published a handy guide to when to expect election results in every state. We should know the result in Florida, which could go either way, on election night, for example. Many of the early-reporting states will go for Trump, but it would be telling if his margin of victory is lower than in 2016. Some of the early-reporting states, such as Montana, South Carolina, and Colorado have critical Senate races.

The early voting suggests a really big turnout, which is supposed to favor Democrats. It looks like younger people are voting in higher numbers than usual. That should favor Democrats. I am hopeful the votes will give us a good result, if they are all counted.

Trump is on the stump declaring Covid has been vanquished and Hunter Biden Hunter Biden. See Paul Waldman, Republicans are trapped by Trump’s insane ideas about how to win this election.

I keep seeing new videos of recent rallies in which Trump repeats his “covid,covid, covid” whine, which on the local teevee news tends to be juxtaposed with recent reports of increases in cases and hospitalizations. Several of the so-called swing states are seeing a big spike in cases right now.

Paul Krugman:

On Tuesday the White House science office went beyond Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Who was that supposed to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it did was make Trump look even more out of touch.

Hang in there, peeps. Vote early if you can.

The contest between Trump and Biden was supposed to tighten up in the last days of the campaigns, but here we are in the final week and Biden’s lead overall is wider. The nerds now have Trump’s chance of winning down to 11 percent, and Biden’s at 88 percent. That’s the biggest advantage for Biden yet.

In 2016, with a week to go, the nerds had Clinton 45, Trump 42. See also Harry Enton, CNN, 8 days to go: Biden’s lead over Trump is holding, while Clinton’s was collapsing at this point.

The Trump campaign continues to step into doodoo. The headlines this morning told us that hundreds of Trump supporters were stranded for hours in freezing temperatures at a rally venue in Omaha, waiting for buses to take them back to their cars in far-away parking lots. Many of these people were elderly. Police did what they could, but the road to the airport where the rally had taken place was clogged. Seven people were hospitalized, according to the local newspaper. It’s possible Air Force One got back to Washington before some of those rally attendees got home.

This is not a good look for Trump, who has run short of money for television ads and is relying on rallies to get publicity. But if he’s using Air Force One to fly around the country to his rallies he’s supposed to reimburse us taxpayers for that. Not cheap. The time-honored trick of incumbent presidents to get around that is to schedule some kind of official presidential event at some place that just happens to have a campaign event nearby. But I can’t tell from news stories that there was anything going on in Omaha but the rally. Trump flew in; Trump flew out.

And it says something that Trump thinks he needs to shore up support in Nebraska. In 2016 Trump beat Clinton 58.7 percent to 33.7 percent in Nebraska. See also the Cook Political Report, Biden’s Path to 270 Widens, Trump’s Path Narrows, as Texas Moves to Toss Up.

Greg Sargent writes that the newest polls show a dip in support for Trump among White voters, including not-college-educated White voters. Most of this shift from red to blue is because of Trump’s botched pandemic response, Sargent says, although a lot of it is disgust at Trump’s race-baiting.

It’s also the case that Trump clearly had counted on fanning the Hunter Biden scandal to squeak out another Electoral College win, but this time major news media haven’t gone along. See Tina Nguyen at Politico, MAGA scrambles to repair the Hunter Biden narrative. “The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both reported finding no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden benefited from the Hunter Biden business dealings that have drawn scrutiny,” Nguyen writes.

The Biden laptop and Clinton email scandals differ in some substantial ways, seems to me. One, the FBI really was investigating Clinton’s emails, and the concern over Clinton’s private server goes back to 2009. It wasn’t a controversy the Trump campaign had to generate. But beside the fact that Hunter Biden isn’t even the candidate, from the beginning the White House and Trump campaign not only had their fingerprints all over the Biden-Ukraine story, they’ve been the sole source of information on new developments, such as the laptop from hell and the alleged Hunter Biden sex tapes (from China via Steve Bannon). Outlets like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit have published everything the Trumpers put out about Hunter Biden, but the more establishment sections of right-wing media have been much more cautious with the stuff. See also Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It. by Ben Smith at the New York Times.

About a hundred years ago, when I was a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, we students got warned about taking jobs with tabloids. Note that the professors at this J School were not academic types but people with years of experience as working journalists. One old newswriting prof named Tom Duffy used to tell us great stories about covering Chicago mobsters as a newspaper reporter in the 1930s, for example. He was a hard ass, but he knew newspapers.

Anyway, the word was that we seniors might get job offers from the supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer, and that these offers would be tempting because the tabloids paid a lot better than regular newspapers. But, we were told, if you take that job, it’s the only journalism job you will ever have. There was no moving from the supermarket tabloids to legitimate journalism, they told us. I thought of that when I read about the Wall Street Journal playing down the laptop story. Trump will be gone soon enough, but the Wall Street Journal will still live or die by its reputation as a legitimate news source. I guess there are places it won’t go.

One can’t say the same about the New York Post, which is part of the Murdoch empire, but at least one reporter withheld his byline from a Hunter Biden story.

On the other hand, David Graham at the Atlantic complains that the press is giving Trump a free pass and not reporting on some recent scandals, such as his stripping of civil service protections from federal employees.. But if you read Graham’s article, you notice that Graham is learning about the scandals from newspaper stories, like this one. I infer that his gripe is that lots of stuff going on is not being covered on the teevee news. But yeah, we need media reform, bug time. We’ve needed it for years.

But this is Trump’s most recent outrage — Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests.

As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock. The relatively-pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.

Next week, if Joe Biden finds himself called upon to give a victory speech, I want him to issue a warning to the developers and the logging companies that the protections will be back in place as soon as he’s inagurated, so don’t bother moving equipment to start ripping up the Tongass National Forest.