Monthly Archives: November 2020

Feeling a little better now that I've slept a bit and eaten something. How I am now reminds me of times in the past where to meet a critical deadline, I had to stay up all night and I paid for it over the next few days. The scripts suffered, as well.

I know you don't come here for election news but here's where I think we are now. All the decision desks have decided to put Wisconsin in the Biden column and some (Associated Press and Fox News) have awarded him Arizona, as well. If he has Arizona, he's at 264 and if he doesn't, he's at 253 since Arizona has 11 electoral votes. The most likely source of the last six that will get him to The Magic 270 is Nevada, which has exactly that number. He seems to have a lead there which will be difficult for Trump to surmount but who knows? They may find more ballots in Wayne Newton's hair or someplace.

We may know about Arizona and Nevada later tonight. If either or both fail him, there seems to be a good chance of him winning Pennsylvania's 20 votes but not such a good chance of Pennsylvania being decided today or tomorrow. And then there's the possibility of Georgia's 16 or North Carolina's 15 but those two could go either way.

I was waiting until I had more of my brain functioning to try and write a piece about why this whole election is so depressing to me but Fred Kaplan did it for me. WARNING: It should depress you too, even if you're pro-Trump. The divisiveness in this country has made everything contentious — people are dying and we can't even get everyone to agree there's a pandemic — and our country is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Which makes things worse for everyone.

I've been sleeping in about 90-minute spurts and I still need another spurt or two today. I didn't post the last two times I got up.

The news at this moment looks good for Biden but it would be a narrow win, contested with court challenges and recounts for a while…and even if it holds up, we'll have to listen to Trump and his loyalists insist for years that he wuz robbed. I think if you beat Trump in a game of tic-tac-toe, he'd dispute it 'til his dying day.

I may be more depressed at the prospect of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announcing, as he will, that he will take great pride in blocking every single thing President Biden tries to accomplish.

Hey, could someone explain to TV newspersons that if you voted early by mail — perfectly legal — and your state isn't counting those ballots until the end, that does not make them "new votes?" Trump managed to convince a lot of people that if there was less testing — and therefore, fewer cases of the coronavirus being identified — there were less cases of the coronavirus. Now, he seems to want to try convincing them that if votes are being counted after Midnight of Election Day, they were cast the next day.

Oh, well. According to Trump, today's the day we won't hear any more about "COVID, COVID, COVID," because the news was only mentioning it so often to make him look bad. And he's right. Nobody's talking about the 91,530 new cases reported yesterday.

I think I need another spurt of sleep…

I'm having trouble sleeping. Up and down, up and down. I don't feel anxiety. I just can't sleep.

If you want to obsess (as I've been doing) on which uncounted votes in which areas are likely to go which way, the best place I've found is this blog page over at Nate Silver's 538 site.

Different networks have called different states so Biden it at either 224, 225 or 238 electoral votes while all have Trump at 213…so naturally, Trump has declared he's won.  Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin have yet to be called by anyone and they're all still counting ballots except for where they've decided to turn in for the night and resume counting tomorrow.  Turning in for the night is sounding real good to me right now so I think I'll go do that. Good night.

So it's looking like…

• Predictions of chaos and physical threats at polling places did not come to pass for the most part.
• People will be even less likely to trust pollsters in the future.
• We won't have final results for Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and perhaps two or three others until at least tomorrow. So we won't know tonight who won.
• There could still be court fights over admitting some ballots, including military ones.
• The predicted-by-some Democratic landslide ain't happening.
• Everyone is at least a little horrified that so much of the country didn't vote their way.

That last one will probably be the case for a long time.

This just in…

GARDENA (CBSLA) — Caltrans crews worked Monday night to clear 30,000 pounds of noodles from the northbound lanes of the 110 Freeway after a semi-truck overturned. The truck overturned at about 1:55 on the freeway near Rosecrans Avenue, according to California Highway Patrol. One person was taken to the hospital with unknown injuries, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Caltrans District 7 reported that crews were still working to clear the noodles at about 8:30 p.m. and were expected to remain on scene until 10:30 p.m. The three right lanes of the freeway were closed for the cleanup.

Quick! Somebody get out there and overturn a truck loaded with mushroom soup and one loaded with tuna fish. We could have the greatest casserole of all time.

In some future election — probably the next — I will probably find myself on the side opposite to most of the folks behind The Lincoln Project. But I'm impressed with the commercials they've whipped up this time to oppose Trump and his enablers. Here's one they put up this morning…

There seem to be 87,000 folks on the web providing detailed guides as to how to watch the election returns, telling you that if at 8:47 PM, five guys in Rhode Island are reported to have voted for the Sesame Street party, it's a good indicator of a landslide Cookie Monster vote tonight. Or whatever.

My prediction is that we will find that not one of those 87,000 forecasters will have accurately called that aspect of Election Night correctly. Voting machines will break somewhere. Court challenges somewhere will hold up the counting or reporting of some state or county. There will be delays that will never be explained. A vote this size — more of it mailed-in than ever before — is so unprecedented that something's got to go wrong. What if in some key state, there's a huge line waiting to vote when the polls there officially close?

I will further predict that no matter who you think is going to win, there will be some early report that makes you panic that they won't. And then that trend may or may not change.

I have two more predictions. One is that I will spend today working and trying to not pay attention to early, possibly meaningless returns and to predictions on TV by people who have no idea what's going to happen but since they're not paid to say that, they'll make predictions anyway.

And lastly, I predict that I will not succeed in not paying attention to the news until the meaningful returns begin arriving. But maybe I can get something done before that happens. Keep your spirits up. It could be a long night and it could include Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Thanksgiving, National Pearl Harbor Day of Remembrance…

I was right to take yesterday off from looking at the election. Absolutely nothing happened that affects the vote today.

If there's a Trump victory, every mainstream pollster is going to have to abandon that profession and get into something that has more public confidence…like sending out those e-mails that claim a Nigerian prince wants to wire millions of dollars into your bank account. I don't see a major, non-partisan pollster who thinks Biden has less than a 7.5 point advantage. Analyst Charlie Cook, who has been fairly accurate and respected in the past, thinks Biden's lead is between 9 and 10 points.

These paragraphs from Mr. Cook's closing forecast are worth quoting here because I think this is pretty much the conventional wisdom…

Joe Biden's path to 270 electoral votes seems pretty straightforward: Hold all 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) that Hillary Clinton carried four years ago, which total 232 electoral votes, just 38 short of the majority threshold of 270. Then win each of the three states that Clinton lost by eight-tenths of a point or less: Michigan (0.2 percentage points) Pennsylvania (0.7), and Wisconsin (0.8). That gives him 278 electoral votes, eight more than needed. Biden will likely also carry two congressional districts that eluded Clinton in 2016, Nebraska's 2nd District and Maine's 2nd, giving him 280 electoral votes. That would represent a "skinny" Biden win.

A big Biden win would bring in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, and might also include one or two states from the next tier, mostly likely Georgia or Iowa, although don't count out Ohio or Texas. Generally speaking, Trump is underperforming his 2016 pace by 3 to 8 points, depending upon the state or district.

Of course, the conventional wisdom has been wrong before and it will be wrong in the future. Believing in it is like splitting eights in Blackjack. It's the right move most of the time but don't be surprised when it doesn't work.

Earlier this year, I decided to include The Economist among the poll aggregating/analyzing sites I consulted. It's been invaluable for tracking the many pollsters but its "model" — weighting certain polls more than others and factoring in other indicators — has been increasingly outta line with most others. This morning, they put Trump's chances of winning the electoral college at 3%. Some of the folks who are behind it have apparently expressed some doubts about their own model.

Seeing Trump's chances in the low single-digits has eased a lot of worries but a more accurate measure is probably at Nate Silver's 538 where they say 10%. And they see a final total of the popular votes as 52% for Biden/Harris, 43.2% for the guys who claim the virus is just about over. The Fox News Poll — which is a pretty good poll as polls go, and a tough one for Trump supporters to claim is biased against them, though some do — has the race as 52% for Biden, 44% for Trump.

And almost all the polls see Democrats as picking up more seats in the House and taking control of the Senate. Charlie Cook says, "The Senate is increasingly less a case of whether Democrats will take a majority, but how large will it be."

Do I believe all this? I'd like to but I believe in not celebrating, even in your own mind, until you actually win. It lessens the pain when you don't.

I've decided this is a good day to not pay too much attention to the news. It's unlikely anything will happen apart from the elevation of blood pressures in all kinds of people with all kinds of Election Day wishes. This thing could already have been settled by mailed-in ballots for all we know. No matter what "worst nightmare" you have for this election, you can find an article somewhere that will tell you it's likely or definite.

I'm going to spend the day writing. Whatever content I do post — and it may not be much — will be about something else. Anything else.

Hey, let's get our minds off you-know-what and watch seventeen minutes of Marx Brothers…

I don't know what's going to happen this week and neither do you. Not knowing is unsettling and you'd think by now we'd be used to it. One of the non-lethal but still upsetting things about The Pandemic is that we have no idea when it will end, how it will end, how it might get worse, what will be left after it ends, etc.

All the sites that aggregate polls are saying there's at least a 90% chance Joe Biden will get the most votes for the Electoral College and I'm at least that certain. None of them can tell us anything though about court challenges, honest counting, judicial decisions, etc. And we have only educated guesstimates of when we'll know who got how many votes. This is very much uncharted, unprecedented territory.

We also don't know how the inevitable anger by the losing side will manifest itself. Some folks will be livid but what will they do?

In situations like this, I think it helps to acknowledge the uncertainty and not try to predict too much when you simply can't know. You just frustrate yourself when you decide A will happen, then B, then either C or D and finally, probably E. You frustrate yourself because then R happens and it somehow leads to J and then to some letter in the Greek alphabet…and just when you thought you had it all figured out. But you didn't.

Try not to think too much about it. There are way too many crazy theories and projections and folks who say they have it all figured out but they don't. "I don't know what's going to happen" is a perfectly acceptable way to face a situation. It's the truth more often than some of us like to admit.

You know, if I'm one of Donald Trump's BEST supporters, he's in a lot more trouble than the polls indicate…

Mark,

You've been identified as one of President Trump's BEST supporters and we wanted to reach out to let you know about your EXCLUSIVE offer.

The Election is just DAYS AWAY and if we're going to WIN BIG AGAIN, we can't afford for any TRUE Patriots — like YOU, Mark — to sit on the sidelines.

President Trump originally authorized a 975% IMPACT on all contributions to help us CRUSH our End-of-Month Goal, but we're SO CLOSE that he's decided to up the stakes.

For a limited time, President Trump has authorized your gift to have 1000% more IMPACT toward CRUSHING our End-of-Month Goal.

That's right, Mark, when you make your next contribution, it will make 1000% MORE of an impact.

This offer is available for the NEXT HOUR, so you need to act fast.

Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to increase your impact by 1000% and to help us CRUSH our LAST End-of-Month Deadline before the Election.>>

I still don't get the logic they're selling here. Throughout this campaign, Donald Trump has apparently had the magic power to make a $100 donation turn into a much larger one. For a while, he showed restraint and if I'd given him that amount, he would only have turned it into $200. Then he began authorizing larger boosts. At one point, he was only authorizing donations to be raised up to 975% but now that he's SO CLOSE to his goal, he's authorized it to go to 1000%. But only for one hour in this message that arrived at 3:21 AM.

It scares me that this must work. They wouldn't keep sending me these pitches — like Trump is doing me a favor by taking money from someplace to help him get more money — if they didn't bring in some results.

I'm getting ten or so of these a day — some allegedly from Mike Pence, one or two from Don Jr. or Ivanka, one even from Newt Gingrich. It's chilling to think there might be people out there who would say, "I wasn't going to send Trump any money but since Newt has asked me…"

I also got one or two that for a limited time only, said that if I gave any amount, they'd send me a FREE TRUMP GIFT. They didn't say what the FREE TRUMP GIFT was but, hey, how could that not be wonderful? Maybe it's an autographed copy of his Comprehensive Health Care Proposal. Or maybe it's Jared. He won't be needing him much longer.