The dread and anxiety that are stalking the land this autumn have nothing to do with ghosts and goblins. It may have something to do with that creepy Silver Shamrock CEO selling off all these weird masks for Halloween, but I doubt it.
We are, across the United States, rushing towards a Presidential election cycle of 2020 that has driven the stress levels for a majority of Americans to levels greater than the emotional turmoil we endured after 9/11. It's where the reality of most Americans panicking that for all their efforts to turn out the vote for their side of Center-Left issues and leadership, the political minority dominated by Far Right leaders who refuse to serve the public good will still find a way to rig the results and stay in power against every democratic norm our country is supposed to follow.
There's been some notice in the media outlets about this anxiety and most of them - like this one in Slate by William Saletan - are trying to lower the despairing doom by pointing out the flaws of the 2016 results that left America truly leaderless aren't going to affect 2020:
The 2020 election is coming down to the wire, and millions of Americans are freaking out. They’re afraid President Donald Trump will surge at the end and win, as he did in 2016. But there are good reasons to think that won’t happen, based on measurable differences between the two elections. Joe Biden is in a much better position than Hillary Clinton was.
Biden already has more than 200 electoral votes—probably around 230—in the bag. To reach the 270 necessary to win, he just needs three states Clinton narrowly lost: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Let’s call these the core states. If Biden loses one of them, he could still get to 270 by taking Arizona, Florida, Georgia, or North Carolina. Let’s call these the bonus states...
Biden isn’t just leading in more states. Across the board, his vote share is higher than Clinton’s was. On the Friday before the election, Clinton was averaging 48.8 percent in the core states and 46.3 percent in the bonus states. Biden is averaging 51.2 percent in the core states and 48.8 percent in the bonus states. To beat Clinton in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all Trump had to do was pick up undecided voters. That wouldn’t suffice against Biden, since he’s above 50 in each of those states...
Thing is, we're already seeing trump and his Republican lackeys meddle in all of those battleground states. We've been getting stories about attacks on the ballot counting in Pennsylvania. Minnesota and Wisconsin are on notice from the trump-allied federal courts about the potential cutting off of late-receiving ballots. The fears that the Postal Service - hog-tied by trump's buddy DeJoy - aren't delivering ballots in time are proving true in Miami-Dade, forcing a belated state intervention that shows little sign of getting the votes in on time.
Granted, the Early Vote turnout is an encouraging ray of hope. Texas alone in 2020 has exceeded already the total voter turnout of 2016. Given how lower turnout in elections tends to hurt Democrats, this is a good sign that turnout enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket is in play and Texas could flip (still, no guarantees unless EVERY Tex Dem gets the damn vote to the ballot box!).
This election year is getting down to the wire, in some places literally, with the ongoing concern of voter intimidation on Election Day itself as well as any last-minute assaults on our rights to vote.
The last time I felt this stressed out was 2012, when it seemed like a tight race between Obama against Romney with a national media dancing to Tea Party propaganda noise and ignoring all the blatant obstruction the Congressional Republicans committed to hamper the nation's recovery from the 2007 Recession. It didn't have to be that close, I thought, and at the time it felt lucky that Obama won 52-to-47 percent with a healthy Electoral margin.
How naïve I seemed back in 2012 when in 2016 the worst-case scenario happened anyway, and with a far more incompetent and inhuman nightmare with trump.
This weekend, I'm fucking praying that a 52-to-47 Biden-over-trump win is enough to get that Electoral win as well. Given the voter suppression/ballot-tossing the GOP is openly willing to do, it feels like Biden is going to need 60 percent to even eke out the Electoral Presidential victory his supportive majority needs.
I'm not the only one feeling out of sorts, on edge, nervous as hell. Half the gamers I know on City of Heroes are freaking out. My professional and personal circle of friends and allies among librarians are twitchy. Several of my fellow writers in the local critique groups are having trouble even sleeping normal the last two-three months.
This isn't your normal Halloween, after all. COVID-19 stalks this land. There's a nationwide spike of infections overwhelming our hospitals RIGHT NOW. We've got a real-life scary monster rampaging the countryside, and nobody in a position to fight it - trump, Mitch, most Republican officials - even wants to talk about the problem.
The rest of us are stuck hiding behind the sofa, watching the scary movie play out while covering our eyes with trembling fingers, only it's no movie and the only way we can survive this nightmare is to wake up and vote, vote trump out before the shambling zombie wreck that is the GOP gets us all.
The foulest stench is in the air/
The funk of 4 trump-led years/
And grisly ghouls from Putin's plot/
Are closing in to steal your ballot
And though you vote to stay alive/
Your nation gets pulled to ribbons/
For no election cycle can resist/
The evil of... the Shitgibbon!
(seriously, get the damn vote out for Biden/Harris and for every Democratic Senate candidate and every Democratic state office. It will be the wooden stake through the heart of a corrupt and lethal Republican monster.)
2 comments:
Your electoral college shitshow is so baffling to non Americans. Why do you even have voting if results can be ignored?
Allan, you're not the only one wondering about the fcked up Electoral College.
The legal explanation for it was that the Founding Fathers mistrusted direct elections of a President because they feared a Populist, demagoguing charmer would bluff and lie his way into the office. So they set up a complicated electoral process that they figured would split between multiple candidates and force the vote into the House where the state delegates would force the choice on the more respectable candidate (and give power of the Congress over the Executive branch as a federal check-and-balance).
The real reason was to grant the smaller-populated states a disproportionate say in who won the Presidency. At the time, half the small states were slave states, which started abusing the control they had over both the Senate and the Electoral College to force the political parties that rose after Washington's tenure to accede to their whims. It got worse by the 1850s when the population shift - and the addition of California as a Free state - threatened that balance of power to where the slaveowners turned into full-bore obstructionists and Minority Party rulers ignoring the majority of the North and Midwest (and ignoring the moderate plurality in their own slave states) to where civil war was unavoidable.
To get back on track about the follies of the Electoral College, it's an unnecessary hoop to jump through to select a President. Most of the time, the popular vote and state wins matched each other, so there was no need to worry about it. In the times the popular vote and the Electoral College were at odds - 1800, 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000, 2016 - we had constitutional crises because the system failed to respond as intended and made things worse.
The tragedy is, the only way to get rid of the College is via Amendment, which in this partisan age is impossible to attempt. The only other options are to revise and reform it within the constitutional limits, which should include increasing Electoral Votes for larger states, and eliminating the Winner-Take-All that skews the results unfavorably between partisan forces.
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