Mean Nation

I guess we're more like anti-EU, anti-immigrant Brexit Britain than I realized.  It's hard to be a "city on the hill" if people don't feel they can afford to provide some of their resources towards satisfying collective needs.

I didn't watch television coverage of the election, but have looked at some articles, and it doesn't appear as if Biden can win.  

Looking at the New York Times website, and handicapping the vote of the states that haven't declared a winner yet, it seems as if Biden will get 269 Electoral votes, and you need 270 to win.

I could be wrong.  I say Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin will go for Biden for sure.  If Michigan does too--Trump is leading in the reported vote, but it's close, then Biden will win.  It seems certain that the other states--Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia will go for Trump.  

But I'm not sure about Michigan (my former home state, I can't f*ing believe it)--Trump is 28,000 votes ahead, but 86% of the vote has been counted.

Screengrabs from the New York Times.

The thing now is that Michigan is scarily Republican due to the decline of manufacturing and the loss of blue collar Democratic worker-voters.  The only reason I'm willing to say that Michigan will go for Biden is that two of the largest voting counties that are Democratic, Wayne (64% of votes reported) and Oakland (85% of votes reported).

I looked at all the Michigan counties--most have reported more than 90% of their votes, and with a couple of exceptions, Wayne and Oakland are the only counties with significant numbers of votes to report, with a much higher likelihood of the votes being cast for Biden.

I don't understand how virtually every swing state went for Trump, nor how the polls consistently came to the conclusion that Biden had big leads,  significantly over 50%, and yet, the voting is about 50/50.  Sure voter suppression has an effect, but that can't be the full explanation.

Drilling down deeper into the states where the vote count continues--each state is broken down by county, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, it seems almost foreordained that Trump will win.  But again, it looks like Biden will take Michigan, and in terms of the Electoral College, Biden will get the absolute minimum number of EC votes--270--to win the Presidency.

I guess the thing about the "Shy Trump voter" is absolutely true.  Because Biden was supposed to be up 56ish to 44, not 50/50.

I can't really take solace in anything about this election.  Similarly to the polls being off, it doesn't appear as if any but a couple of the Republican Senate seats that were stated to be in play were actually in play--Ernst, Daines, the seat in Kansas, Graham, maybe even Tillis, all seem to be comfortably Republican.

And the talk of Texas or Georgia going blue, let alone Florida, seems to have been a pipe dream.  Could Beto O'Rourke running for Senate in Texas and Stacy Abrams running for Senate in Georgia have made a difference?

The talk of a Republican hibernation seems to be a pipe dream as well.  Even if the vote is 50/50 and slightly favors Republicans, how are Republicans supposed to be chastened as they get everything they want, the Senate, maybe not the Presidency, but the Supreme Court?

I don't understand how when the US death rate from coronavirus is more than 5 times higher than Germany, let alone 76 times higher than South Korea, that anyone could vote for him.  He's malfeasance and misfeasance has killed almost as many people as Saddam Hussein.

After the 2004 election, The Stranger, one of Seattle's alternative weeklies, ran a piece called "The Urban Archipeligo," about the cities vis a vis the rest of the country.  

In 2020, The Stranger's relative optimism in 2004 about cities being able to go their own way is misplaced.

Given Trump's vindictiveness and active program to deny resources to those communities that don't vote for him.  As well as his destruction of the ability of the federal government to be competent.

If he wins, he will act on those tendencies much more proactively.

Even after the 2016 election, I didn't feel that I had to move to another country, although for the most part I did stop watching television news.  Now, I'm not so sure.

The US has severely reduced the acceptance of immigrant asylum claims.  I wonder if Democrats can make credible asylum applications for emigration to other countries in the face of this election.

There's no question that the United States of America is a very different country from what I was taught that it was, what it stood for, and how it acts.