(This was going to be a “taking tonight off” post, but I had to record this information somewhere.)
(Also, I was arguing with my wife, who discovered this information, about whether this was “our” Bill Stodden, until seeing that look on his face in this picture. Yeah, that’s him.)
6:33 PM: I am sitting on my couch, iPad in my lap, phone to my right, MSNBC streaming on the television in front of me. The polls in Indiana closed half an hour ago and the state has not been called yet, which I’m choosing to believe is a good thing despite the fact that Trump is up 60-40 with 3% of the vote in. I can’t promise regular updates or that I’ll not abandon this in a fit of depression in a couple hours but We. Are. Live.
6:40 PM: I know I said this yesterday but I actually do think we’ll have an idea of who the winner is in a few hours. Will it be literally called? Probably not, but I think the writing will be large and glowing on the wall. I’m sure I’m wrong.
6:41 PM: This Philadelphia DA really should have just said “Fuck around.” If you’re gonna repeat “eff around and find out” four or five times just say fuck.
6:45: One of my cats spies a random other cat through our front window and starts making absolutely psychotic noises at it, causing the whole house to temporarily freak out and descend upon the room he’s in.
6:50: I take a few minutes to track down useful local race coverage. It occurs to me that the school board races are probably the first things I’ll know about definitively tonight. Mike Braun and Todd Rokita are both up but there’s only about 10% of the vote in and I’m not worrying about it right now. No matter how things go nationally the local races in Indiana are probably not going to be good news.
6:54: Reports of multiple bomb threats in Democratic areas in Georgia, which … sadly fails to surprise me.
7:00: A whole lot of states are about to close, and meanwhile … this, from Rush County, IN. I don’t actually know where these results are from; they were just posted to BlueSky.
My wife has had a theory that Kennedy was going to do unexpectedly well in Indiana that she has been talking about for a while; we’ll see.
7:06: It does look like that data was flipped, and everybody’s called Indiana. They called Banks for Senate too, fuck. Oh well.
7:17: They’re chattering about Georgia and I’m reloading the local races over and over. I really want to see School Board results, dammit!
7:22: Mental note that I’m not allowed to look at the New York Times website tonight, first, because fuck the fucking New York Times, and second, because their tech people are on strike and I don’t cross picket lines.
I’m gonna have to figure out a way to charge my phone from the couch. Hmm. Surely the boy has a charger around here somewhere. He lives on the couch.
7:27: I mentioned this in other places earlier, but I dressed in blue from head to toe today without even realizing I was doing it. I just changed into comfy pants and those are blue too. Meanwhile, I can’t find a charger cord long enough for my phone, and my son’s charger is Lightning, not USB-C, so I’m screwed there. Somebody bring me a ten foot USB-C cable.
7:29: The Vermont Senate race is called for Bernie Sanders, who I didn’t realize was running again. Does he know how Goddamned old he is?
7:30: A few more states’ polls close and West Virginia gets called immediately for Trump. What a Goddamn surprise. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin’s Senate seat goes to a Republican. Sigh.
7:36: Still waiting impatiently for my county to report literally anything.
7:38: I threw $20 at Slingbox for a month of CNN and MSNBC, by the way. I’ll cancel it in a couple of days because once the election’s over I don’t need it any longer and the second month will be twice as expensive.
7:42: Some dude is on a college campus in Arizona talking to students waiting in line, and apparently some male student told him that he voted for Trump because Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he didn’t know what she stood for, and I think it’s fine if that kid is never allowed to vote again.
7:43: Apparently that dude is at Arizona State and his name is… Gottie? I dunno, Rachel didn’t spell it.
7:44: Sigh. AP has called the IN governor’s race for Mike Braun, which not only means that we have him in office but his Christianist, psychopathic running mate, who makes him look like Mitt Romney by comparison.
7:52: I swear to Christ that if Kamala should have done Joe Rogan makes its way into The Discourse I’m gonna commit some crimes. I don’t even know which ones. Some of the crimier ones.
7:58: The way I can tell all the MSNBC people are my age is that they just interviewed De La Soul and all of the anchors are losing their minds over it.
8:00: Seeing online that Mark Robinson has lost the Gubernatorial race in North Carolina. Florida just got called immediately which kind of catches me off guard. It probably shouldn’t, though. So far no real surprises anywhere.
Illinois being “too early to call” is kind of alarming, though. Then again, so was Indiana.
8:03: This is unreasonable but right here at this exact second is the first moment of real dread tonight. Rick Scott is projected in Florida, too.
8:06: I want a Big Board.
8:10: GOD DAMN IT ST. JOE COUNTY DO YOU NEED ME TO COME HELP COUNT THE POLLS HAVE BEEN CLOSED FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS REPORT SOME VOTES
8:20: Not a lot going on and one of the cats is trying really hard to move into my lap, which is already occupied.
8:21: Rachel Maddow says thirty-two different places have received bomb threats in Georgia today. Christ.
8:28: Fuuuuuck I do not want Mike Braun to be my governor. Again, it’s not surprising at all, nothing that has happened tonight has been a surprise yet, but I’d like some good news other than the North Carolina governor’s race.
8:30: Florida’s abortion amendment is running at 57% but Rick Scott has already been called as winning the Senate race and Trump has been called for the state. Make it make fucking sense.
8:44: Kind of in a holding pattern until 9:00 hits and a bunch more states’ polls close. We’re in the doldrums part of the evening right now and I don’t think things are going to be getting better for an hour or so. That’s if we’re lucky.
A tranche of votes hit in St. Joe County, and with a quarter of the vote in the guy I really don’t want on the school board is in second place, which puts him on the school board. No idea where the votes are from, though; there’s no way I’m getting precinct-level data on school board votes.
8:47: I just saw an actual TV ad for … a podcast? Seriously? We’re doing that now?
8:49: Oh, there were bomb threats called into Navajo areas in Arizona too? Really? Weird how these keep happening to Democratic areas.
8:59: How horrible will the next minute of my life be? Stay tuned!
9:00: Nobody’s talking about the House at all. Anything changing there? Anyone wanna mention that?
9:01: Pretty fucking horrible, as Texas got called fucking immediately. We can still hope for Cruz to go down, I suppose, but Texas continues to disappoint.
9:06: Wait, NBC hasn’t called Illinois or New York yet? Come on.
9:14: Big Board dude is going on about how suburban and rural counties are moving more to Trump, which is true, but a difference of 200 votes isn’t really going to make much of a difference if the cities move by the same percentage and have twenty times as many people.
9:20: OH MY GOD STOP SAYING SLIPPAGE. PLEASE. IT HURTS.
9:21: Quit talking about Georgia and give me some numbers from Iowa.
9:24: Hey, good news! Sarah McBride wins a House seat in Delaware, making her the first transgender woman elected to the House. That’s a big deal. And apparently Fani Willis just got re-elected, too.
9:25: The FBI says the Russians are calling in hoax bomb threats all over the place, in case that single minute of good news made you feel any better.
9:26: I don’t know who any of these people who aren’t Rachel Maddow are, but the old white guy just chimed in to say that we “never had bomb threats at polling places before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate.” That is utter bullshit, as any primarily-Black precinct in the fucking South could tell you. Christ, what ahistorical nonsense.
9:33: I think right here is where I abandon the idea that we’re going to know anything tonight. I was hoping for a scenario where we’d be overperforming the polls— the shy Harris voter thing— but it doesn’t seem to be happening.
9:37: Continuing tonight’s theme of Not Surprising but Still Depressing, Marjorie Taylor Greene is projected to win reelection. Which makes me wonder if Colorado’s polls have closed yet. I think they have; I’m gonna go check on Boebert.
9:39: She’s up ten points with 2/3 of the vote in, so she’s probably reelected too.
9:42: I know I’ve talked some shit about this costume for the new Superman movie, but I am hugely in love with this picture even if the S-shield is wrong and I can see the stupid high collar.
9:49: I would like Rachel Maddow to explain what the fuck is the difference between “too early to call” and “too close to call.” Do they just change the language when a certain percentage of the votes come in? Is it possible to flip back to “too early”?
9:52: Two hundred years since he first ran for president, I still do not understand how this guy is getting even a single vote.
10:09: Fifteen minutes of talking my brother off the ledge via text message. Having eerie flashbacks to having a similar conversation with my mother in 2016. Colorado called for Harris.
10:18: Seeing a report on BlueSky that the Dems are now projected to take the House? Assuming it’s nonsense for now; it’s way too early, but Goddammit the way I have no information at my fingertips about it is driving me insane.
10:19: Steve Karnacki, whose name I am almost certainly misspelling, continues his infuriating habit of talking about candidates outperforming or underperforming 2020’s vote totals without referencing the absolute number of votes being discussed. 50% of the vote in Philadelphia is in and Harris stands to net at least another 200,000 votes when the rest of it comes in, which erases slight Trump gains in dozens of podunk rural counties.
10:22: God damn it, MSNBC calls Iowa for Trump. And fucking Cruz in Texas. Fuck. Fuck. The fabled Seltzer poll appears to have missed the mark.
10:32: Speaking of “shit I saw on BlueSky,” somebody’s called Georgia for Trump? That’s bad. That’s the first genuinely no-shit really bad sign of the night.
10:39: I’m starting to get deeper into the weeds in looking at county-by-county results in individual states. I’m getting depressed and scared and starting to contemplate taking brain meds. The bomb threats across Georgia are starting to look like they flipped the state.
10:43: Also assuming that the “we’ve taken the House” report was bullshit at this point.
10:58: Okay, new plan is never pay attention to BlueSky again; I don’t like what I’m seeing in Georgia, but people are literally still voting and if anyone has called it I haven’t heard about it other than that one post.
11:00: God, I hate this. But I’m pretty sure I felt the exact same way at this time in 2020. Polls in California have closed and it’s called immediately for Harris. Trump takes Idaho. Still no surprises.
11:02: HOW IS NORTH CAROLINA TOO EARLY TO CALL, RACHEL MADDOW. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST AND ALL THAT IS HOLY TAKE THIRTY SECONDS AND EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK THAT MEANS.
11:03: Dare I look at Montana and see what’s going on with Tester’s race, or is it going to just depress me more?
11:05: Okay, only about six percent of the vote is in. Nothing to see here yet.
11:16: NBC calls the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno, which means that we have lost the Senate. Even if we pick up the seat in … what is it, Nebraska? and hold Montana, the Senate’s gone.
11:21: AP has called North Carolina for Trump. And I know that this is more or less exactly where we were at this point four years ago, but I think I’m done now. I’m sweaty and tired and I need brain medication. We haven’t seen a single state flip yet but the only one I feel good about is Pennsylvania and there are going to be flips somewhere.
I have done a good job of avoiding both doomscrolling and hopescrolling, because both of them are dangerous to my mental health. I have my lesson plans ready for tomorrow; I am off Tuesday and Wednesday, because no one deserves me, and hopefully the world is still here on Thursday for me to return to work, but I make no Goddamned guarantees, and if I am still a lunatic, I will stay home for a third day in a row.
I have been working on Platinuming Black Myth Wukong all day today and once I am done with that I have a lot of housecleaning, a bunch of books and Dragon Age: Veilguard on deck. I have plenty to keep me from thinking until it’s time to inject cable news into my veins for 24 hours straight on Tuesday night.
I was, for reasons that I can’t quite reconstruct at the moment, looking through my blog for everything I’ve ever written about Joe Biden the other day, and then this tweet came across my feed:
President Biden’s job approval average for his recently completed ninth quarter in office is just 39.7%. Only Ronald Reagan in early 1983 had a lower ninth-quarter average among elected post-World War II presidents. (Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup) Details: https://t.co/35JH3LMpdVpic.twitter.com/wylyTb8OmE
This irritated me at the time, and I snarked at the tweet, and for some reason it’s still on my mind a couple of days later so I’m going to piss on it again. This chart is bullshit, orchestrated by a media that is absolutely desperate to manufacture some drama about this upcoming election and whether Biden will be the nominee, which he absolutely will if he is still alive. First of all, let’s look at the actual claim: that Biden has the second-lowest “ninth quarter,” which as we all know is a super important fucking metric, of post-WWII presidents. Second-lowest? Yeah, Reagan’s was worse.
You may not be old enough to remember the 1984 election. I am, though. It looked like this:
So this is already a bullshit statistic, because the worst “ninth quarter” performance by a president since WWII led to a fucking ass-whupping in 1984 unseen since, what, fucking FDR? (EDIT: Yep. I looked it up.) Mondale won his home state and Washington DC, and he only won Minnesota by eighteen hundredths of a point. It was 49.72% to 49.54%. Less than four thousand fucking votes. A bad storm in Minneapolis that day and he’d have lost.
That’s already fucked up, but it gets worse. The next two worst results also lost, but the two after that were Clinton and Obama, both under 50%, and both of whom won reelection comfortably. And the highest approval rating on that chart is George H.W. Bush, who lost. Humiliatingly, frankly.
I’m not quite pissed enough to run the statistics and figure out how related “ninth-quarter approval” is to reelection, but that’s at least partially because it’s obviously not. OpinionToday needs to shut the entire fuck up, and I really need to kill my Twitter account.
To be clear, I hope he dies, and I don’t care who knows it, and the notion that he might die alone and gasping for breath from a disease that he refused to do anything to prevent is so karmically beautiful that I almost don’t know what to do about it.
A few years ago, I was trying to not be that kind of person; I have given up that fight. It’s lost. I hope he dies. He’s a terrible person and he’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead people and the fact that my mother never got a funeral and his painful, solitary death would be one of the very few 2020 events that counted as positive.
That said, it’s a little bit constitutionally complicated, so let’s run through some scenarios.
If he dies before the election: Mike Pence becomes President until at least Jan. 20. It is too late for the Republican Party to put anyone else’s name on the ballots. They are printed and thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people have already voted, and state deadlines have passed. However, continue reading.
If he dies before the election, and loses the election: Mike Pence is still President until Jan. 20, there is likely no Vice President named, and Biden becomes President on January 20.
If he loses the election, then dies: As above. Pence takes office until Jan. 20.
If he dies before the election, and wins the election: This seems unlikely but isn’t impossible, and is where it starts getting complicated. The Republican party is in control of both their nominees and their nomination process, neither of which are specified in the Constitution, since the Constitution knows nothing of political parties. Furthermore, remember, you’re technically not actually voting for President, you’re voting for electors who are bound, sometimes not actually legally, to vote for that person later. There would, no doubt, be a quick party convention where someone– presumably Pence– would be nominated for President, along with a different VP. The Party would then inform their electors in the states they won to vote for whoever the person they chose was. This would have the potential to get really, really interesting if the Republicans find out they can’t coalesce around a single candidate, but that goes beyond my knowledge of the procedures involved. This would skirt some state laws that require electors to vote for the person that won the popular vote in that state, but I don’t see actual prosecutions being likely in this case, although that little wrinkle has potential to make this even more complicated if, say, there’s a state that he won that somehow has a Democratic legislature and governor.
If he wins the election, then dies before the electors have voted and the votes are officially certified by the House: The Electoral College votes on December 14, over a month after the election, and then there’s over a month between the Electoral College voting and the actual inauguration. This is where it gets really interesting. Pence still takes office for at least a little while, but I don’t know if things still work the same way as they would if he wasn’t alive for the election. I think they probably do, so long as the electors have not voted yet, the party can still scramble to pull an actual ticket together, and it wouldn’t automatically be Pence.
If he wins the election, the votes are certified, and then he dies: Pence becomes President, and remains President for the second term, as far as I know. For all I know, it ends up in the Supreme Court, because holy shit is there no precedent for this, but I don’t see it coming out any other way.
Not a lawyer, blah blah blah. If you see anything I’ve blatantly gotten wrong, let me know.
There have been years– not a lot, but they’ve happened– where I spent more on my classroom than the person in the White House did in Federal taxes in the year he was elected.
I’d like to think that these recent revelations are going to make a difference, but I’m not surprised by anything in them and I doubt many other people are either. That said, the article is worth a read, if you can handle the inevitable explosion of hatred and anger while you’re reading it.
I don’t generally miss presidential debates, even if I don’t liveblog them, but I really might have to skip this one.
The last time I did this was– Jesus— almost a God damn year ago, and since then not only has Kamala Harris dropped out, but so has everyone else I wanted to vote for except for Buttigieg, who has spent most of the last eleven months making me dislike him. I have gone from a Democratic presidential primary where I went through eight people before even entering “meh” territory to one person I want to vote for– Warren– a bunch of people who I despise, and Amy Klobuchar, who I wouldn’t have even considered a serious candidate any longer until New Hampshire, and frankly I probably shouldn’t start treating her for-real seriously until she does better in more than one state.
What I have been saying for the last several months remains true: this race is still Biden’s to lose, despite his poor performance in Iowa and New Hampshire, because unless the poll results have shifted radically in the last couple of weeks he’s still the only candidate with a serious base of support in the black community, who are still the base of the Democratic party and who haven’t had a chance to vote yet because of how fucking stupid our nomination process is. I have heard tell that those numbers are starting to shift, though, and if they are, Biden’s fucked, which is kind of fine because I think he’s slowly losing his shit and I don’t really want to vote for him.
But … God, I don’t want to vote for any of these fuckers other than Warren, and every time I try to think seriously about ranking them, I spend most of my time pondering the inevitability of death instead. I mean, to be clear: I’m voting for the fucking Democratic nominee in November, full stop; I don’t give a fuck who it is. But I really don’t like any of them beyond Warren, and I remember enjoying being able to vote for candidates who I wanted to hold office, damn it.
So.
2. … Klobuchar, I guess? Who is an asshole, and a moderate, and she’s shitty to her staff, but that’s all I’ve got and she hasn’t managed to personally piss me off yet? Plus, she’s a woman and she doesn’t have one foot in the grave or any obvious decline in her mental facilities? So, yeah, sure, Klobuchar’s second, I suppose, mostly because someone has to be.
3. Buttigieg. I have voted for Pete Buttigieg literally every single time he has run for office, and I don’t want to ever vote for him again. Yes, in March I was somewhat enthusiastic about his candidacy. And he’s spent damn near every second since then trying to drive me away with his Jesusiness and his Kumbaya approach to “working with” people who would literally rather see him dead than in office. But much like Klobuchar he has the advantages of not being senile or nearly dead, and I’m not convinced he’d be a shitty President, and he’s smart, if perhaps not as smart as he thinks he is, and if he made a sensible pick for VP he might not be a disaster as a President, although of the current group I think he’s the one most likely to run for a second term and lose.
4. Fuck it, Biden. Who is running an absolute shit campaign, and who is perhaps not as senile as I thought he might have been a bit ago (I was unaware until recently that he has battled a stutter his whole life, and that explains a couple of things) but is still noticeably not as sharp as he was a decade ago, and has run for President three times now and so far still has not ever managed to finish higher than third in a primary. And he clearly doesn’t understand the nature of the opposition he’s facing, either, because he’s competing with Pete for the Kumbaya naïveté awards. But at least he’s not either of those other two assholes, and of the group of three he’s the one most likely to have some fucking sense and not run for a second term in the first place. Leaving me with …
Bernie and Bloomberg, and fuck both of ’em, I’m not ranking them. I loathe Bernie Sanders. I like his policies but Warren’s are every bit as good as his and she’s not a garbage human and she’s actually got some accomplishments in her life, unlike Mr. Myocardial Infarction Where The Fuck Are Your Taxes, whose life’s work boils down to not having a job until he was 40, naming a couple of post offices, and exactly three black-and-white photos of him being a massive civil rights hero on par with Malcolm X, Jesus and Martin Luther King combined. He will be a desperately shitty President and nothing will be accomplished during his single term in office, if he even lasts that long without dying, because who the hell knows what kind of condition his God damn heart is in; his campaign has lied about it endlessly and he’s refused to release his medical records. Which is not fucking forgivable even before you get to the part where he’s basically a cult leader and I cannot tolerate the idea of an America where the Bernie Bros have political power.
(Am I calling every Bernie voter a cultist? No. I am explicitly not doing that, and if you are a Bernie person and I know you I am also explicitly not calling you personally that. But I stand by the statement nonetheless, particularly in the context of the vile hordes of his people I have to deal with online.)
Bloomberg, on the other hand, is a racist piece of shit and a blood-gorged tick on the nuts of humanity, and he’s carefully and clearly exposing every single thing wrong with what we are still calling our “democracy” for some reason. I have no idea why anyone would ever choose to vote for him, and the fact that he’s registering in the polls at all is a sign of how dangerously and completely fucked we are. If somehow the race is down to these two by the time the Indiana primary rolls around I’m probably just not going to vote. Again, I’ll vote for the nominee even if I hate him, which is looking more likely by the day, but I’ll be damned if I endorse either of these fuckers twice if I don’t absolutely have to.
(EDIT: When and if Bloomberg turns out to be a serial sexual harasser and/or a rapist, which I’m figuring even odds on, he immediately falls off the list altogether. That would be one thing that would definitively shove him under Sanders for me.)
I will vote for Bernie Sanders if he is the Democratic nominee for President. I will do this cheerfully, with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, and there is nothing on this planet or in the heavens that can prevent me from voting against the shitgibbon next November short of my own death.
I would prefer nearly every other serious Democratic candidate currently running to be the nominee. I might end up choosing Bernie over Biden at this point, honestly.
While I am not a fan of Sanders, I bear the man no actual ill will. I’m happy for him to remain in the Senate for as long as he’s able, and I’m grateful for his role in bringing the more leftward elements of the Democratic party more to the forefront.
I’m glad he’s recovering and out of the hospital.
He is 78 years old, will be 79 when inaugurated, just had a heart attack, had two stents put in, and his campaign lied about it for three days.
That is not as catastrophic of a medical disaster as it would have been even ten or fifteen years ago. My mother and my father-in-law both have stents in various parts of their bodies. It’s a fairly simple procedure, as these things go.
He needs to drop out anyway, and everyone who knows him and loves him needs to be telling him this until he listens.
I’m genuinely sorry to have to be saying this right now, despite the fact that I have gleefully called for Sanders to drop out of the Presidential race more than once in the past, and fully expected to be doing so several months into the future. But I was expecting for some votes to have been cast before we reached this point. I don’t like the idea that the guy needs to drop out so that the race doesn’t literally kill him. But this is it. It’s enough. He’d be the oldest President ever inaugurated, and it’s the toughest job on the damn planet, and a 78-year-old man who just had a heart attack and whose campaign’s first instinct was to hide from it is not up to the job. I am aware that one of my preferred candidates is 70, and believe me, I wish she were a decade or so younger. But this guy is five years older than the monster in the White House is now, and that guy’s visibly falling apart on a daily basis, and I’d expect Bernie to actually pay attention were he to become President.
It’s time for Bernie Sanders to withdraw gracefully from the race, before his body betrays him again and he has to do so under less voluntary circumstances.
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