Think Happy Thoughts

I woke up Tuesday morning to a bad thought that if I waited until Election Day itself - November 5th, kiddos! - that I could show up to my precinct and find out the local Republicans somehow submitted a fake ballot in my name and take away my vote. 

Paranoid as I was - they can't really do that, right? - I decided to forgo the tradition of voting on the day itself. I went to the Bartow Early Voting location to go ahead and get my vote in the machine.

At the Polk Street Community Center

As I talked about earlier, there were key matters to vote on this 2024 election cycle, above all making sure donald "34 Felony Counts" trump won't cheat his way back into the White House and voting for a saner, competent Kamala Harris:

BALLZ TO THE WALZ, AMERICA

I made sure to vote for the Senate seat:

FCK YOU, "MEDICARE FRAUD" SCOTT

I made sure to vote Democratic for the Congressional, State legislative, and county seats by the by.

And of the six Florida Amendment referenda, here's my votes YES on Three (decriminalizing marijuana) and Yes on Four (Abortion rights for women).

Damn, the ballot sheets are longer than my arm...

Let there be no confusion: This is about letting
women control their own bodies instead of the
Culture War wingnuts

Part of me is worried I didn't ink that completely filled...

So now at least for myself, it's all over except waiting for the ballot counts.

And GODS HELP ME, I'm still stressed about it. And I know I'm not the only one. 

So let's try to look for the positivity reflected in how there is a better mood among Democratic and Left-leaning Independent voters heading into November. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice shared some good vibes via a post on Substack from Kevin Dillon:

My texts are full these days of “are we gonna be okay?” and, then, a beat later, “are you really sure?” Over and over, my answers are basically “yes” and “as sure as I can be...”

So, to save some time and in the spirit of “to hell with it,” here in one place is what data and my gut tell me I believe: she’ll win and outperform the polls. Trump will be rejected, as he has been in every election since he first became president - 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 - either where he was on the ballot directly or by proxy through candidates closely identified with him, including in multiple of the same swing states we’re all obsessing over now.

His campaign’s relentless focus on anti-trans ads will come to be seen as an epic strategic blunder, in addition to unforgivably morally repugnant. We’ll acknowledge that the supposedly disciplined, well-planned campaign to beat Biden never quite found its footing ever again once the candidate changed. We’ll remember that his one and only, and very close, win in 2016 came when he was, despite controversy, new and fresh and funny (to his people at least - and no small amount of journalists.) He was energetic, went EVERYWHERE, and was able to at least occasionally give the impression of being in on the joke and enjoying himself. In 2016, he had an underrated strategic ambiguity on what kind of Republican he was, whether promising to protect Social Security or maintaining a wink-wink ambivalence on abortion, aided by voters’ inability to truly imagine him doing the most outrageous things, or the horror of Roe being overturned. In his own way, he had a kind of disciplined, positive and constructive message about what he would do: make America great again, build the wall, drain the swamp. In 2024, he has none of it, much less the vitality and clarity of eight years ago.

We’re going to see afresh what’s been staring us in the face since 2022: Dobbs was a political earthquake, with aftershocks still reverberating out. It wasn’t just digested and processed in 2022 and now behind us. As much as Roe catalyzed a new movement for its opponents, brought in new groups of voters (many crossing old partisan lines), and energized activists for decades; Dobbs is doing the same here and now.

To the extent poll error happens, I believe it is likelier to be in her favor than his after eight years of pollsters obsessively focused on how to not miss Trump supporters. We are all understandably so traumatized by 2016’s loss, and so many were surprised by 2020’s margin (though notably, not the Biden campaign itself) that, even though there are fairly convincing theories for how each happened, we’ve become hostages of superstition and anxiety - even when we can’t quite articulate a good theory for why it would happen this time. And all this despite the various modeling geniuses gently and repeatedly reminding us there’s no iron law that every error happens in the same direction cycle after cycle, indeed that it might be a little weird for it to happen three cycles in a row...

We have to remind ourselves that trump's NEVER won the popular vote, that he's incredibly unpopular among the broad range of voters (even among some Republicans). We need to remember that unpopularity hurts him against Harris whose popularity numbers have gone up during the final stretch of the campaign (much like Obama's in 2008). I've said before people tend to vote for the candidate they like the most - it's not rational but emotional - and similar to Biden (who was popular then) outperforming trump in 2020 Harris can do the same this 2024.

Like Dillon noted, a lot of us on the Center-Left of the political spectrum were emotionally scarred  watching trump grab the Electoral College away from the popular vote winner Hillary (her unpopularity due to decades of hathos was a major factor in her loss). A lot of us still can't comprehend how 74 million people voted for trump in 2020 after all of the incompetency, aggression, open graft, and failures of his administration; and we're arguably terrified of the possibility he's convinced even more to vote again for him after his felony convictions and civil court fraud and rape findings.

We have to look to the sizable number of Republican voters showing signs of refusing to vote for trump again. There is hefty opposition by former GOP officials and former members of trump's own Cabinet, publicly denouncing him on a scale never before seen. We never had a similar number of aides and Cabinet Secretaries do this to the likes of Nixon or Ford or Carter or Reagan or Bush the Elder or Bill Clinton or Bush the Lesser or Obama; even when those administrations - especially Dubya's considering the failures of the economy and the mismanaged War on Terror - were clear disasters. These are things even disconnected voters will notice as they make their choice.

We need to enjoy the reality of how Harris and her Veep co-runner Walz are conducting themselves in this last mad dash to the finish line: With joy and exuberance and feistiness and hope. We need that hope to convert into turnout by the millions - higher than the 81 million Biden secured in 2020 - and to regain a kind of spiritual balance we lost 8 years ago.

Let's get the vote out, everyone, and vote for the right things: Vote for sanity and stability in the White House with Kamala. Vote for women's rights and freedom from wingnut cruelty. Vote for better representatives in our legislatures both state and federal. Vote FOR the bright future of 2025 and not the darkness of a trumpian dystopia.

(Hands still shaking while drinking iced tea) I'm calm... I'm perfectly fine... I AM A CENTER OF PEACE AND SERENITY! Ahem. Sorry.