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.
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.
Places like MI and OH are turning "red" because people like you and I are moving out of them -- and not having kids.
ReplyDeleteUrbanism is wonderful, but it is a demographic sink.
The positive is places like VA and AZ turning "blue".
Agree the polls are off. The move by hispanic men to trump has been enormous and not surprising.
It ain't over yet, but, while I'm deeply disappointed, but I guess not all that surprised. It seems about 49% of the country is pleased with the way things are, and wants more of it. I have to say though, I'm 50 and single and I've sort of given up hope. I've been thinking a lot over the past couple years about how i'll manage to get to retirement and maybe live a few years of quality life before health care and/or long-term care expenses completely deplete me. Of course this also assumes I make it through next year and not be thrust onto the job market at 51. I'm dealing with 2 parents in a nursing home now and its simply exhausting. I hope I have enough faculties to off myself before it ever gets to that.
ReplyDeleteMore in line with your thinking...
ReplyDeletehttps://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/trumpism-election-results-america.html
Anon -- Suzanne and I joined our household with her parents. They are 83 and her father has dementia. His wife does a lot of the care, Suzanne a bunch, and me a wee little bit. He's genial fortunately, but eventually things could go really bad.
ReplyDeleteThere's no question that the "social care" sector (what the UK calls it) is going to be further stressed.
I'm 10 years older than you. Still relatively healthy but breaking down and I understand your concerns definitely.
As far as retirement goes, without our house as wealth, we'd be in bad shape...
wrt "Trumpism is here to stay," yep. Terrifying. He (and Fox 'News') have allowed people to express openly their worst characteristics, resentments, isms, etc. People don't want to put that back into their jack in the box.
ReplyDeleteThe point you made about people like us leaving, I was thinking about in terms of "cosmopoles" and the peasants. I guess its the perennial problem in society.
While there is no question that the Senate is shaped to favor rural interests, clearly we are cleaving into two very different attitudinal segments about ourselves, our community, our country, and the world.
Expecting "the blue wave" I had been working on a piece about national service, which I intended to have ready for election day.
I'm still going to publish it, because this cleavage demonstrates more than ever we need ways for people from different demographics and places to come together and work on projects and accomplish things together and then go off to live their lives.
Getting such a program approved will be a big lift. But there's no question that we need more mechanisms to connect us. We have plenty of such mechanisms that divide us.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/america-divided-rural-urban/2020/11/04/8ddac854-1ebf-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html
ReplyDeleteWhereas I wrote that piece about why wouldn't the wealthy fare better from coronavirus, events like the Depression and WWII were unifying events, albeit terrible.
The programs in the New Deal, like the CCC (and many of those kinds of programs exist, just not in a unified fashion, and they are "voluntary" from Youth Conservation Corps to Americorps).
I think spending your year after high school (one year required, another at your choice) doing national service--I need to find out more about how it works in Israel although granted most people just serve in the military--is a way to begin not a healing, but recreating a consensus about what the US is.
... not unlike how I've been writing since 2009 and the Metrorail crash that the consensus for what transit is and should be in the Washington area needs to be reconstructed and refreshed, given that the original vision was crafted in the late 1960s, and those people are gone.
(FWIW, I also argue that when you want to create local sales taxes and such to fund transit, pursue it when the system is new and everyone loves it, not when its older and you're desperate for funds.)
Jennifer Rubin:
ReplyDeleteThere are deep problems in America that stem from one party’s refusal to operate in the factual world in favor of a world that allows ignorance and resentment to shape political views.
on the other hand, those hard core trumpers will be giving each other increasingly mutated covid strains for years from now, and refusing masks and vaccines. we may sadly watch fascists literally die out. As they fell a safety net is not needed.
ReplyDeleteToo many advances in treatment to be able to rely on that.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/health/coronavirus-ferrets-vaccine-spray.html
Although along these lines I'd been thinking that Trump should do a goodbye tour of rallies because of their success as superspreader events.
We're on the same page...
Similarly one of the benefits of smoking cessation has been the reduction of premature deaths, so people are living longer, costing a lot more money in old age care when previously tobacco-related disease/death short circuit education that.
"Too many advances in treatment to be able to rely on that."
ReplyDeleteThere's still always meth and despair.
Nathan Robinson argues that the reason the election is so close is because the Democrats didn't run a truly progressive, hard left campaign.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/05/trump-should-have-lost-in-a-landslide-the-fact-that-he-didnt-speaks-volumes
I think that the election is close speaks volumes, that there are plenty of lessons in messaging and programming.
But if 69+ million people voted for Trump, it's not like a goodly number did so because they want universal health care, a $15 minimum wage.
I am just floored at how many Senate candidates that were touted as able to win got _crushed_:
Montana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, South Carolina, Texas + reporting on Espy in Mississippi said he had a chance.
And how many Democrats lost Congressional seats in Republican leaning seats.
There's no way the disaffected but voting segment of the electorate voted Republican because they offer a better agenda for the working class.
Will Hurd barely won his border district last election. Fewer than 700 votes. He didn't run again. But the Republican easily won (granted by only a few thousand votes, but thousands not a few hundred).