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.

I really like Julien Neel's barbershop quartet even though all four members of it are him. He he (they?) favor (favors) us with a song that would be appropriate for Halloween if this was really Halloween…

It's Halloween…at least on the calendar. I won't repost my annual "I've never liked Halloween" post (it's here if you must read it) but I'm fine without that holiday in my year. I've had no trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood for over a decade and would expect zero tonight even if Halloween hadn't been more or less called-off.

And I have nothing to say about the late Sean Connery that a zillion other folks aren't saying on the web today. Loved the James Bond movies he was in…liked a few of his other screen appearances. Lost a lot of respect for him when he began talking about how women should be slapped around. That's about it.

The election projections over at The Economist have been fluctuating between Trump having a 4% chance of winning and then for about half a day, a 7% chance. When he hit 7, of course I thought, "Oh no! He's gaining a point a day! By Tuesday, he might be up to 11%!" Nate Silver's site had him at 11% for a long time and currently has him down to 10. The Economist currently has him back down to 4%. (These are the odds of him winning, not the percentage of the vote he'll get.)

Can he still win? Sure. But right now Joe Biden's in about as good a position as you could hope your guy would be in the Saturday before Election Day.

As I understand it, the legal theory Trump and his crew are going to push on Election Day is that in each state, they should count ballots until such time as Trump is ahead and then stop counting, disqualify the rest and then award him the state.

Rudy Giuliani is running around screaming (literally) that the press is covering for Joe Biden by not reporting on the "new" Hunter Biden revelations but as Kevin Drum notes, the press has been trying to and has been blocked by, among other obstacles, Rudy Giuliani. He's not letting them look too closely at what he claims to have unearthed. Reporters simply cannot see enough of the so-called evidence to determine if there's any "there" there…and at worst, none of it seems to implicate the person actually running for president. It's kind of a non-smoking smoking gun loaded with blanks and pointed at the wrong target.

The other night, CBS aired prime-time episodes of The Price is Right and Let's Make a Deal, both recorded recently and with all sorts of adjustments for social-distancing and no real studio audience. I couldn't make it through Let's Make a Deal but then I've never really been able to enjoy that show — not with Monty in the first place, not with anyone else who's hosted it since. And if I can't like it with Wayne Brady, who I think is one of the great talents of television…

The Price is Right, which I sometimes like to watch was…odd. They piped in a low-level audience presence sound which made it spooky, like ghosts were filling the seats we didn't see out there. The contestants were, like on Let's Make a Deal, essential workers who deserve lots of rewards for the job they've been doing but not a lot of them won anything, and everyone stayed six-feet apart.

They were playing traditional Price is Right games, many of which are routinely won on the regular show because the studio audience is shouting out numbers. One contestant once even won both showcases with an on-the-nose bid which came from someone in the audience. Here, there was no audience helping the guy who didn't know the price of a blender or whatever it was…so less wins than usual. And the pre-selected contestants were obviously chosen for and coached to be super-enthusiastic. They all came on dancing and one even did a cartwheel.

It felt fake and forced and at one point, I got to wondering if everyone had been tested. If they had, there wouldn't have been as much need for the six-foot separations…but then I realized: Without them, it wouldn't have been as good an ad for enforcing social-distancing and other precautions. So I give them an "A" for effort. It didn't work that well as a game show but unlike certain rallies I could mention, it was a nice example to put before America.

One minute before 4 PM, I was with a friend of mine who's visiting and we heard a couple of those chilling THUMPs of cars hitting cars. Worried that one of those cars might have been my friend's parked out front, we sprinted outside. My friend's car was fine but three cars in the intersection outside my house weren't fine, nor were all their occupants. Medical attention was needed but it didn't appear anyone was seriously hurt.

Neighbors were spilling out to see and the folks in the cars were tending to cuts and starting to exchange info. My friend asked, "What do you think happened?" and I replied, "I don't know but I might have it on video." One of my security cameras captures the front of my house and also a nice chunk of the street outside. Sure enough, it had captured the accident. I pulled it up on my iPad and moved the video to where it would be playable (and e-mailable) through my Photo app. Then I ran back out.

By now, the street outside was filling up with tow trucks, emergency vehicles and one police car, all of which arrived a lot quicker than I would have expected. Two police officers — a mixed-race, mixed-gender combo — were taking down info and conflicting statements. I watched them for a while and was impressed by their efficiency, courtesy and command of the entire situation.

I waited until one of the officers had a moment, pointed to my house and told him, "The security camera on my house captured the whole thing." His face lit up like I'd given him a lovely gift. He said, "Can you wait 'til we finish with all the paperwork?" I said sure…and I watched him, as well as his partner, finish handling everything precisely the way a situation like this should be handled.

I should mention that that has been true of every single encounter I have ever had with police officers. I know there are bad ones out there. We often see the damage they do. But every policeman or woman I've ever met had been just what you want police officers to be.

As the tow trucks began hauling the battered cars away and the paramedics departed, the female officer came over to me, watched the short video on my iPad and said, "You got it, clear as could be." I didn't do anything, of course. The camera got it and it wouldn't have gotten it if the collisions had happened about three feet to the left. Just luck.

The male officer came over to see it and the female officer told him, "I wish we had this for every accident." I gave him my contact info, we did an AirDrop transfer of the video from my iPad to his iPhone and the officers thanked me and started to head for their car.

A woman who'd been in one of the injured cars figured out what we were doing, came over to me and asked, "Can I see that?" I asked the officers, "Any problem with me giving her a copy of it?" The male officer said, "It's your video. Do whatever you want with it." I showed it to the woman then AirDropped it to her cell phone and she excitedly waved over her husband, who had been in the car with her and showed him what I'd given her. They were very pleased. It showed pretty clearly who was at fault and it wasn't whichever one of them had been driving.

Where this goes from here, I have no idea. One of the officers said there was a slim chance I might be called as a witness but it was unlikely. I also gave my contact info to the couple but I forgot to say, "When this is all resolved, give me a call and tell me how it was all resolved." Maybe they will anyway.

No one said this but I got the feeling that the police collected the accounts of the folks in the cars, they did not match up…but the video will settle the question of what actually happened. I wonder how often that happens now in the era of security cameras and cell phones.

And here we have what I assume will be Randy Rainbow's closing argument for this election…

Nate Silver's 538 website has been busy predicting who'll win what races in the upcoming election but now they're also predicting when each state will finalize its vote-counting. It may not take us as long as their charts would indicate. For instance, they put California and Utah in the category of "Only some of the vote will be counted on Election Night" but I think we all know where those two states' electoral votes for president are going.

Then again, there's going to be human error and ballot-counting machines are going to fail and there will be places where they keep the polls open all night because there's still a long, long line of folks who've waited hours to cast their ballots.

They think Florida will be completely counted on Election Night. Well, maybe. If it is and Biden wins that count, that probably means Biden wins the White House. The converse is not true. Florida is only one of many "must win" states for Trump. There are a lot of 'em…especially Pennsylvania, which 538 thinks won't report for a day or three. Just be prepared for anything. And we have no idea where or how Trump may be mounting legal challenges and if they'll go anywhere.

The best list I've found of which states are in play and how many of 'em Trump has to take if he's going to pull off a surprise win is on Charlie Cook's site in this PDF file. And you might want to read this essay by Mr. Cook about what has gone wrong for Mr. Trump in a electoral sense.

The subject line above should be sung to the tune of "Hello, Dolly!" We're bidding a fond farewell to Jerry's Deli, a favorite place to dine out in Studio City. It's closing today after 42 or 43 years, depending on which news story about it you read.

If you live (as I do) in L.A. proper and want to meet for a meal with someone who lives in The Valley, Jerry's was a good place to meet. It was not only well situated as a middlepoint, it had a big menu, decent food, decent prices, decent parking…and if you had the urge to knock down some ten-pins, there was a bowling alley in the back.

I'm sitting here, thinking of lots and lots of lunches — business and social — I had there as well as a few Power Breakfasts, some dinners and a lot of late night dining. But I have to admit those were all quite some time ago. I gave up on the place at least five years ago as a result of too many poor meals with poorer service.

The whole Jerry's chain — which once included something like eight or ten locations — had shrunk to just the one. The closing of this one is being attributed to the decline in business because of COVID-19…and I'm sure there's a lot of truth to that. But Jerry's Delis have been closing all over the Southland for many years now. I think there was something else going wrong there.

But I do remember a lot of great sandwiches and great times at the Studio City location and also at other Jerry's Delis.  The one other unpleasant experience I had there was because of a very rude bus boy who was screwing up everyone's orders and staging little hissy-fits over polite complaints. It was Andy Kaufman, who for some reason enjoyed working there and at another restaurant I went to — the Posh Bagel — long after he was recognizable from television.

As a bus boy, he was a real dick and please note that I am not saying he was a funny real dick. He was just a real dick. It apparently amused him greatly but I can't say it amused anyone else, at least the times I saw him do it at the two restaurants.

Sad to say, he's gone and when it closes this evening, Jerry's will be gone as well. True, I hadn't been there in years but I kept thinking of going back, hoping it would be the way it used to be. Because when it was good, it was real good. Unless your table was being bused by Andy Kaufman.

A whole bunch of Broadway performers, some of whom I know, got together and made this great pro-Biden video set to songs from Bye Bye Birdie and The King and I. Again, I'm not out to sway anyone's vote at this point. I just think it's real entertaining.

Which causes me to ask this musical question: Have you seen any real clever, funny, well-performed videos on behalf of Donald Trump? There are a lot of them for Biden. You all know my line about how writing comedy from a Conservative point-of-view is like writing a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one. But there are some right-wing comedians and musical comedy performers. Have any of them produced anything I should post here?