I need all of you to know something very important: never once in my life, nay, never once in the entire history of the human race, have the Democrats lost a Presidential election the day after I got a Platinum trophy in a PS5 game. It hasn’t happened once.
That is as optimistic as I intend to get. I was burned hard by 2016, as many of you were, and I’m refusing to hope, like, at all right now. I intend to go into tomorrow night being surprised by even the slightest scrap of good news. I can’t afford hope right now. I just can’t.
Minerva Grey asked me this in comments yesterday:
I am curious and a bit afraid to ask because I don’t want to run the risk of being talked into it, but how is watching election returns not detrimental to mental health? It strikes me as doomscolling and hopescrolling combined, and the likelihood of a definitive answer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (at least on the U.S. east coast) seems highly unlikely.
First, let me be as clear as I can that, while I will be either on my couch or at my desk tomorrow, likely scrolling and reloading on my phone, my iPad, and a laptop simultaneously while watching one or more cable stations, that is because I am insane, in a way entirely different from my actual diagnosed mental illness. I mainline the news during elections, presidential and midterm. I have been like this since I was a teenager, and at 48 I’m not interested in swapping out those particular stripes. I will likely be up very late tomorrow night, and when I finally go to bed it will only be so I can go to sleep and open the news right the hell back up. For me, not throwing myself into as many news sources as I possibly can during that time is what’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t ignore an event of this magnitude. If you can, and if that will help you get through the next 48 hours, I enthusiastically recommend you turn absolutely everything off and do whatever you need to do. I took personal days tomorrow and Wednesday because I know myself and I don’t need to be around my students while I’m stressing this hard. But not watching everything as it comes in is not going to help me.
And while I really don’t want to make any predictions, I actually do think we’re going to have an answer tomorrow night, if not perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, or at the very least we’re going to have some results that point rather conclusively at one answer rather than another. I think when I do go to bed I will have a pretty strong idea of who the winner is going to be, and while there will absolutely be all sorts of litigation afterward, I don’t think it’s going to go much of anywhere.
Of course, I know nothing about politics, and I am wrong all the time, so you don’t need to pay too much attention to that last paragraph, and if we lose via court shenanigans the thing that happens next, where I kill God and leave his body on the steps of the Supreme Court, has absolutely nothing to do with me having made a prediction that some heavenly being, I’m not specifying which one, decided to make cataclysmically wrong, probably out of pure spite.
(I’m taking some refuge in the fact that Joe Biden is President right now, and I’m reminded of something Andrew Jackson once said about another Chief Justice named John: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”)
I did get a sticker, but I got Indiana’s boring one, not any of these cool stickers.
I always try to vote early, but I don’t recall ever voting on the very first day I was legally able to before. This year, though? I wanted that shit over with, and I drove from work directly to Mishawaka’s county services building, arriving about 20 minutes before the doors closed. The line for early voting was out the door, and it took about an hour to get my vote cast.
For the most part, my votes will not surprise you.
These six fine ladies, along with two male ticket members:
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice-President Jennifer McCormickand Terry Goodlin for Governor and Lieutenant Governor Valerie McCray for Senate Lori Camp for US House Destiny Wells for Indiana Attorney General Maureen Bauer for State House
(They’re up there as a gallery, so it’s possible the order of the pictures doesn’t match the order of the names.)
I voted for the Democrat in all of the local races with one exception: I did not vote for Dave Niezgodski for State Senate, because Dave Niezgodski is a sex pest and I don’t vote for sex pests. I thought briefly about voting for his opponent, but without knowing anything about him, I decided to refrain; honestly, this will be a small enough turnout contest that I feel like simply withholding my vote is enough. I don’t need to actively vote for the other side.
I got to vote against the loathsome Derek “I have a penis” Dieter again, which always pleases me, because fuck that guy.
Purely voting strategically, I voted to retain all of the judges up for vote. I don’t really like voting for judges, to be honest; I rarely know who any of them are and they don’t campaign, and for some reason the Indiana bar’s survey isn’t out yet despite their website promising it’ll be ready by September 30th. I voted to retain because all of them were named by Mitch Daniels or Eric Holcomb, and if they were drummed out of office Mike Braun will likely be picking their replacements, and Mike Braun is a fucking lunatic. Whoever he picks will not be an improvement, so absent any information of use for any of them, retention it is.
The only thing left is the school board, and … our school board candidates are not exactly covering themselves in glory this go-round. My specific candidate for my district isn’t up this year, so I’m just voting at-large, and … ick.
I ended up voting for Jeannette McCullough and George Jones. I know both of them and I am not especially fond of one of them– in fact, I have suggested voting against one of them in the past– but the other choices are worse. In particular, if you’re local enough that this matters to you, I specifically do not endorse Gabrel Kempf and I really really really do not endorse Marcus Ellison. Please do not vote for Marcus Ellison. I have known him for a very long time and I do not want him on the school board.
Related:
Getting from work to the early voting center I used involved about ten miles of driving on a road that was sporting a surprising number of political signs. They’re really not all that common yet, although I’m sure that will change, probably by this weekend. And after a while something struck me about all those signs: first, that there were quite a lot of Harris-Walz signs, more than I really expected, and that most of the lawns with Harris-Walz signs also had other signs for local or state offices.
The interesting thing was the Republican signs. For the most part– and I may take this route again on my way home on Thursday to take a closer look and maybe do some counting– it seemed like lawns that had Trump signs only had Trump signs, and even more curiously, lawns with signs for any other Republican candidate often did not have Trump signs. There would either be a Trump sign by itself or a dozen local and state candidates and no Trump sign.
At the moment, I’m presenting this only as an interesting anecdote and I am not drawing any conclusions. I just want it noted for the record. Feel free to speculate on your own, if you like.
The way this week has been going, I fully expect that by the time I’m done with this post Kamala Harris will have announced a running mate and it will be none of these people. But what the hell, let’s speculate. To be clear, I don’t have super strong feelings about any of these folks, and a lot of them I don’t know a lot about, so take all of this with salt as usual, and remember that I know nothing about politics. That said, let’s start top left and go clockwise.
Josh Shapiro: Brings Pennsylvania with him, I think, which makes him the most immediately attractive candidate on the list at least in terms of electoral votes. I am a little leery of putting a strong Israel supporter on the ticket; I don’t know a ton about Shapiro but what little research I’ve done indicates that AIPAC should be pretty fond of this guy. And, yes, I mean “strong Israel supporter” and not “Jewish person,” and if you don’t recognize the difference, I invite you to go talk to Bernie Sanders about Benjamin Netanyahu.
Andy Beshear: One of my best friends lives in Kentucky and she is absolutely ecstatic about the idea of him becoming VP. Brings Kentucky with him, potentially has a strong positive role in Ohio and Indiana as well. Probably the best direct comparison to JD Vance, and I get the feeling he absolutely despises him, which will be fun. Vance is basically Beshear’s Wario anyway. My wife’s choice.
Roy Cooper: Bringing North Carolina over would be cool, but he’s too old. I want this ticket to radiate youthful energy, damn it.
Pete Buttigieg: My horse. Easily the best communicator on the list and another person who absolutely personally despises JD Vance, who just said that he wasn’t a parent today. He has two adopted kids. Not sure if it’s the wisest move in the universe for the Presidential candidate to be a Black woman and the Veep to be a gay guy but I’m also not sure I give a fuck at this point. I didn’t like Buttigieg’s 2020 candidacy because he wanted to be a Kumbaya guy; I think four straight years of being hauled in front of Congressional committees to be preached at by belligerently ignorant assholes has probably cured him of that. I’m not convinced he brings any states with him, though.
Gretchen Whitmer: Has already stated that she’s not interested in leaving Michigan; I really don’t see Harris picking another woman anyway. She’d be great but it’s not going to happen.
JD Pritzker: No thank you. We already have Illinois and I don’t need a billionaire on the ticket.
Gavin Newsom: Meh. We already have California. Really viscerally hates Trump, though, which is nice.
Mark Kelly: An astronaut VP would be cool, but I’d kind of rather have him in the Senate. There would have to be a special election to replace him and the Senate is just too damn close right now to fuck around. Too old and we’re never electing a bald guy to the Presidency.
I thought about including a few people who aren’t in the picture– a few people have tossed Beto O’Rourke’s name into the mix, which … ehh— but I’m pretty sure our next VP is in that picture somewhere. Again, I’d be fine with any of them except maybe for Pritzker, and I’m not even all that sure, other than the billionaire thing, why I dislike him as much as I do. I don’t think he’s really in the running anyway. The three best choices are Buttigieg, Shapiro, and Beshear, and probably not in that order.
Gonna hit Publish and then go find out that she chose Mr. Beast. The post about him can be tomorrow.
Okay. So. Biden’s out. And, at least right now, it looks like the party is doing the sensible thing and coalescing around Harris, although I’m still waiting to see endorsements from a few notable sources– Obama, Newsom, Whitmer, Jeffries and Pelosi chief among them. We are not doing a fucking underpants gnome primary, people. We just aren’t. The candidate was Biden until a few hours ago and now it’s Harris. Get with it so we can move on.
I have not donated money to any political candidate yet this cycle. As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to send Harris some money. You should too.
I am, having had a few hours to think about it, of two distinct minds about this news. First, I’ll remind you that I was a vocal Kamala Harris supporter in 2020. Harris was my horse until she dropped out, and I was ecstatic when she was named Biden’s running mate. In the abstract, Harris being the Democratic nominee bothers me not in the slightest. I thought she’d be a great President four years ago and I think she’ll be a great President right now. I will cast my vote for her with pride and glee.
(I note that in the 2020 primary I voted for Elizabeth Warren, who had already dropped out. I have not actually had a chance to vote for Harris for President yet, only VP.)
I think in a lot of ways Harris is the perfect anti-Trump candidate. Running a Black woman and a former prosecutor against that felon rapist sonofabitch is about as clear a distinction for the two parties’ visions of the future as I can possibly imagine. And if you want to read into the image above for further preferences on the ticket, you go right ahead and do that. There’s no “two sides of the same coin” bullshit going on here. These are radically different candidates.
So yeah. I am, in some ways, not at all disappointed about this, and I’m substantially more excited than I thought I was going to be under these circumstances a week ago.
That said.
Matter of fact, lemme put a separator here.
We have effectively just watched a soft coup against the American President, led by a bunch of shitheel billionaire donors, a handful of elected cowards, and the New York Fucking Times, and I’m not happy about that at all. In fact, I am viscerally fucking angry about it, because Biden has been the best President of my lifetime (and it’s not close) and he didn’t deserve this fucking bullshit.
There are eleven years and well over a million words of posts here; feel free to read through the archives to see what I’ve had to say about mainstream media in the past, and understand that when I say I would not cry a single tear were the NYT brass to be lined up against a wall and shot that this is very much a new feeling for me. I have never seen the media more brazenly put a thumb on the scale the way they have been in the last couple of months, and the way the NYT in particular, an organization that even now is calling for an underpants gnome primary, has gone fully all-in for Trump has been at various times alarming, frightening and disgusting.
The Republicans were literally calling for pogroms last week. They printed out signs for their delegates to wave around calling for mass deportations. The numbers they’ve been throwing around keep getting bigger– I’ve heard as high as thirty million,which is nearly ten percent of the population of the entire fucking United States.
And these people get mad when we compare them to Nazis? We literally had a four-day white supremacist rally on national TV just now. This guy’s running mate compared him to Hitler once.
No, Trump’s “striking a softer tone.” Is he really? No, not even a little bit. But the truth doesn’t fucking matter to these fucking scribblers.
But Biden’s old. But her emails. It’s the exact same fucking thing. Pay no attention to the fact that Trump is in every single way in worse shape than Biden is. Biden old Biden old Biden old.
Fuck the fucking New York Times, and fuck the national media. I have been pushing back on people for years about anti-media tirades. There’s no denying it. They want the country I live in to degenerate into a fascist hellhole, and they want a man elected whose agenda literally and specifically includes putting people like me in jail. And they just turned up the hysteria and kept turning it up until they got what they wanted. It won’t be a week until they settle on their line of attack against Harris. There’s been a bullshit lie for every Dem candidate since Kerry; Harris will not escape unscathed, it’ll just be more brazenly racist and sexist than previously.
And yet.
I’m not Joe Biden. I’ve never met the man; I’ve never even seen him in person. And obviously I don’t know if we’re about to find out about some sort of recent medical diagnosis or something that would have made it clear to him that it was time to go. Fuck the Goddamn debate; he’s 81 and he may have just genuinely realized that he wasn’t up to the stress of campaigning and running the fucking country at the same time any longer. It may be that even without the events since the debate he’d be dropping out today anyway. Hell, he just got Covid for the third fucking time. Every adult has the experience of some family member who was elderly and perfectly healthy and sharp until they just … weren’t any longer. My own mother’s decline at the end was shockingly quick. And I’m sure everyone reading this who is over 30 can come up with a similar example. One fall, one broken hip. One illness. Bam.
It may be that he genuinely thinks he can’t do it any longer and it may also be that he decided fuck it, I’ve given everything I have to this country and I’m ready to be done. I’m very, very fucking angry right now, but I’m not angry at Biden. He was damn near my last choice for President in 2020 and he has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. Perfect? Of course not. Not close. I’m a grown-ass Goddamn man and I know better than to expect perfection from any elected official. They’re all going to piss me off and/or let me down at some point. I don’t even think that’s a cynical thing to say; it’s a simple fact of existence.
But fine. He’s made his decision, and he’s made it in a way that I can’t find any reason to criticize; I had initially thought that he’d passed on endorsing Harris, because I was out of the house when the announcement was made and all I saw at first was the letter, and not the subsequent endorsement. I do think he should use the time he has left in office making the Supreme Court absolutely miserable; the thought of Dark Brandon unleashed for a few months makes me very happy.
One way or another, the rest of us have got a job to do. Get in line and start pushing, motherfuckers.
I don’t have a ton I want to talk about tonight, but I did discover a piece of information earlier today that’s relevant to yesterday’s post and the Biden conversation in general. It occurred to me that we haven’t heard any talk about superdelegates during this primary. Now, on one hand, I wouldn’t expect to hear much about them, on account of there’s only one credible candidate and he’s the incumbent. But the fact that I hadn’t heard anything was interesting.
Well, it turns out the rules changed in 2020, mostly, I assume, because of the vast amount of bitching from Certain Parties in the last several elections about the superdelegates. So here’s how this works: I was correct about the pledged delegates. There’s just under 4,000 of them total and Biden needs a majority of them (which he already has) to be nominated for the Presidency on the first ballot.
On the first ballot.
This is the bit I didn’t know: there are superdelegates this year– 739 of them, to be exact, and technically they’re called “automatic delegates” now, but everyone knows they’re superdelegates– mostly, if you don’t know, elected Democratic officials and Party People. The automatic delegates do not get to vote on the first ballot. But if there isn’t a nominee after the first ballot? They can, which means the total number of delegates increases, which means the number of delegates needed for the nomination also increases.
I pointed out yesterday that even if an unwilling-to-leave Biden didn’t win on the first ballot, the pressure campaign on anyone who voted against him to change their vote in Round 2 would be extreme, particularly if he only missed the majority by a few votes. And to be honest, I feel like the sudden injection of hundreds of superdelegates probably works in the sitting president’s favor, meaning if he didn’t win on the first ballot, he’d likely win on the second. This is a big fucking question mark, though, especially for any scenario where Biden does decide to drop out and not immediately anoint a successor.
I promise, unless something staggeringly interesting happens tonight (Jesus please no) I’ll talk about video games or books or something tomorrow.
I encountered this earlier today on Bluesky and addressed #1 a little bit and now I kind of want to go through the whole thing. Let’s take the idea of Biden dropping out seriously. Why not. Believe it or not, I’m pretty confident about my answers to all of this; that said, feel free to take with salt if you so desire.
I am going to attempt to address each of these questions as neutrally as I can, by the way.
Can Biden be replaced against his will?
Absolutely the fuck not, and I mean that in the strongest terms imaginable. Right now Joe Biden has 3,904 pledged delegates. Everyone else, including “undetermined,” has … 45. He needs a majority. You do the math. While “faithless electors” technically are a thing, most of these folks were picked because they are loyal, and a substantial number of them are legally bound to vote for Biden on at least the first ballot. The idea that nearly two thousand of them would vote for other people on the first ballot is beyond fantasy. It will never, ever happen. And even if this literally impossible thing were to happen, unless those nearly 2000 people chose the same person, Biden would still have a huge plurality. He would absolutely be going back after each and every delegate who had voted against him for the second ballot, and again– he just needs a majority. This just isn’t going to be a thing under any circumstances.
Can Biden drop out?
Yep. He sure can. He could also die. He can direct his delegates to vote for someone else; they don’t actually have to do what he says. He can also simply “release” them and let them vote for who they want.
What if he drops out and throws his support behind Kamala Harris?
One presumes that Harris would be nominated on the first ballot if this happened. It would not be a guarantee but I think it would be very, very likely. The process to find a vice-president would be … interesting. One thing I haven’t seen anyone talking about is Biden throwing his support behind Harris and then becoming Vice-President again. He can do that! It’s happened twice, although neither John Calhoun or George Clinton were President in between the two vice-presidencies. The Constitution only specifies that the VP has to be eligible to become President; Biden has another term of eligibility. There is no legal barrier to him becoming VP again.
What if he actually resigns the Presidency?
This would be an astonishingly bad idea, as Kamala Harris assuming the Presidency would mean that we’d lose the Vice-President and thus lose our tiebreaker in the Senate. A new Vice-President would have to be approved by both the Senate and the House. The House is controlled by the Republicans. They could barely pick a Speaker. We would almost certainly go to January 20 without a Vice-President. You know what else the Vice-President is responsible for doing? Certifying the electoral votes. Regardless of who wins, I cannot even imagine the level of fuckery that could ensue in a situation where the election is close and we don’t have anyone in the position that is supposed to certify that the votes are counted correctly. It would make January 6, 2021 look like a fun day at the beach. I don’t even want to think of it.
Biden absolutely cannot be allowed to resign the Presidency. The good news is I think he’d rather die than quit at this point.
What if he drops out and doesn’t endorse, or endorses someone other than Harris?
There has not been a contested convention for either political party during my lifetime. I believe the last contested Democratic convention was in 1968, coincidentally the year LBJ decided to not sit for another term and then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It … didn’t go well. I think it’s still entirely possible Harris wins on the first ballot even without an explicit endorsement. If she doesn’t, who the fuck knows what happens next.
It is probably worth pointing out that if any of the people currently getting tossed about as magical saviors replacement candidates were actually interested in the role, we’d be hearing about them trying to consolidate support behind the scenes. We haven’t, because no one is doing that.
What about a mini-primary?
That’s basically just a contested convention. As I said, one hasn’t happened in a while, but they’re hardly historically unprecedented. Nonetheless, it would be, charitably, a huge fucking mess. I’ve promised to try to be neutral so I won’t go further into that.
What about getting the winner on the ballot in all 50 states?
This, at least in theory, actually isn’t a problem. The Democrats and Republicans both have a ballot line in every state and the various territories that is currently sitting there empty waiting for an official nominee. Whoever the nominee is will be on the ballot. (*)
(*) In a normal year. I can very easily imagine legal fuckery. It would be meritless but the Supreme Court just decided that bribing them is legal and that the President is a king. Those decisions were also meritless. “Meritless” is kinda the Supreme Court’s thing right now. Typically, though, political parties are given wide leeway in determining their own nominees, and I’m not aware (I could be wrong!) of any case of a major-party nominee being seriously challenged in court for ballot access. That says, something ends up on Matthew Kacsmaryk’s desk, who the fuck knows what happens next.
Who takes the money pot?
Hahahahahahaha lol we’re all fucked.
Okay. If Harris/Whoever is the nominee, we’re good. Kamala Harris is part of the Biden/Harris ticket. She should still have access to the funds raised for their candidacy. Note, for the record, that this is the part of this explainer that I’m least confident about, but I’m still confident enough to be writing about it. Presumably they wouldn’t lose a ton of staff over this; there would be some hiccups and some rearranging and such but I don’t foresee any substantial organizational or legal issues.
If the nominee’s name is not “Kamala Harris,” though, we run into some serious shit. The Biden/Harris campaign cannot simply sign those millions and millions of dollars over to some other candidate. They can, after settling the campaign’s debts and dealing with the no doubt huge number of people who want their money back, donate the rest of it to a PAC, or an organization like the DNC, who may spend it as they see fit.
The new candidates would have to start from scratch. They would inherit some infrastructure from Biden/Harris but … Christ. Office leases would have to be renegotiated. TV time, radio, internet and print advertising is still sold … to Biden-Harris. They’d have to staff up almost completely; at the very least everyone who worked for Biden-Harris would have to be rehired, and all of this on no money, at least at first. Website infrastructure. Immense amounts of fundraising, both small-donor and massaging big donors and bundlers, a good portion of whom will probably be pissed that their person wasn’t picked. Email lists. Voter lists. Volunteers. Bank accounts. Fucking candidate scheduling. Across the entire country. All at once.
Oh, and picking a Vice-President, which would also be necessary, and would be a fucking huge mess because that type of thing typically takes months of vetting and carefully examining closets for skeletons. This would make Sarah Palin look like …
… actually, it probably still wouldn’t be as fucked up as picking Palin.
Anyway, part of the reason why we don’t hear anything about Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer getting themselves ready to run for President after the convention is that neither of them are stupid people, and they realize that building up an organization to run for the Presidency is insanely complicated and doing it in three months from nothing is fucking impossible. Neither of them wants to be the person who took the reins from Biden/Harris and then got blown the fuck out of the water because it took a month to even get staffed up.
Most of the people who are advocating for Biden to drop out have not thought about any of this. I’m pretty sure I have a good idea why; I promised to be neutral, so I won’t talk about it. Look at yesterday’s post for an idea, if you like. This is all magical, underpants-gnome thinking of the worst kind, and I would appreciate it if people acted like they have some fucking sense. Please.
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