Trump’s losing Georgia and he’s going to lose Pennsylvania. His law suits are being tossed.
He’s done.
Update: A good piece on why Trump actually has a case in PA. Doesn’t look like it will matter, Biden will have enough electoral college votes without, but worth reading. (h/t commenter S. Brennan.)
Trump’s election plan (in addition to standard voter suppression, like having almost no machines in poor ridings.):
This isn’t obscure, this is obvious and if you don’t know this is the case you either don’t pay much attention (fair enough) or you don’t want to know it.
The most basic principle of democracy is that you count votes fairly. The Democrats are not faultless here, they went out of their way to keep Greens off the ballot and suppressed voters and slow-counted votes for Bernie Sanders. They simply aren’t doing this much against Republicans (despite various claims) because in general, higher turnouts in battleground States are good for Democrats, and voter suppression (almost always in poor and minority areas, hits Democratic voters hard.)
Trump is in the wrong right now. I don’t think it’s going to matter, because the Republican establishment isn’t lining up for him. Still, one shouldn’t entirely count out the Supremes (if it gets that far, which it may not, as I’m not sure the suits are large enough to change the end result), where it will probably come down to who owns Kavanaugh and what they want.
Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
It’s a little after 2 am, and the election still isn’t called. It could go either way. It looks fairly sure that Dems won’t retake the Senate (and if they do it’ll be by one Senator.)
Let’s put this in perspective, Donald Trump is clearly mentally defective, and he fumbled Covid-19, the result of which was to kill over 200K Americans and throw millions into poverty.
In other words, like 2016, this was an election Democrats should have won easily.
Trump out-campaigned Biden (ten rallies in the last two days of the election.) It’s going to come out that Democrats fumbled battleground states again, not putting enough resources into them, as Clinton did.
But the bottom line is that Democrats keep choosing bad candidates. Biden has no virtues other than a sort of sleazy but OK Uncle vibe. He’s carrying all the baggage of being a shitty neoliberal all his life, who voted for every war in sight and fucked the poor and middle class every chance he got. He’s senile (though no worse than Trump) and he doesn’t have Trump’s stamina.
Two men made this happen. Sanders was moving towards victory when Clyburn gave Biden the southern Black vote with his endorsement, and Obama leaned on all the other candidates to drop out. Boom! Biden wins the nomination.
Sanders is not in senile decline, polled better against Trump (yeah, the polls all underestimated Trump but he had more of a margin), and was able to pack arenas while maintaining a campaigning pace to equal Trump. Nor was he saddled with neoliberal baggage. He has crossover appeal to independents and even Republicans, the people you need to come out to win (Democrats alone cannot carry an election.)
Biden has done worse among everyone but white men than Clinton did. He’s just a bad candidate.
But this is the iron rule of oligarchy in motion. It is better for Democratic power-holders to lose with Biden than win with Sanders. We saw this in England, where we have emails proving that Labour operatives went so far as to actively work against Corbyn in 2017 (and where MPs sandbagged him all through his tenure.)
Biden, like Clinton, ran on “Trump sucks.” Trump ran on a lot of fear of Democrats, a lot of paranoia, but he also ran with MAGA—”I”m going to make things great!”
Although Biden had a relatively progressive platform, that was not the message everyone was hearing. It was “Trump is bad, let’s go back to the good old days.” The problem is that the good old days weren’t great for a lot of people, and pre-Covid polls showed that a majority of Americans felt they were better off than 3 year prior.
Worse, in a lot of states Trump has won the Covid debate: the belief is that it wasn’t fumbling Covid that was the problem, but that Covid is no big deal and if there had just been no closures at all, everything would have been fine. People believe that.
In short, Dems keep running people with bad track records who are responsible for the worse parts of America’s economy and history. Clinton was unlikable, Biden is senile, neither ran an energetic, aggressive campaign of hope.
Biden may still get in (by the time you read this, perhaps he will have) but he won’t have a huge mandate, and he’s unlikely to have a Senate he can work with. None of that need cripple his Presidency, IF he is willing to use executive power aggressively and coordinate with the House, but this is not a wave election.
Finally, if you believe this is all about racism (despite Obama winning handily twice) remember that “racism” is not a plan unless you know how to deactivate it enough to win. If the US is irredeemably racist, well, that doesn’t leave a lot of room.
On the other hand, perhaps running on popular policies like Medicare4All and a $15 (or higher) minimum wage (which passed in Florida even as Biden lost the state); offering a message of hope, not fear, with a candidate who is energetic, can command huge crowds and is not senile or unlikeable, might win it despite American’s racism. Worked for Obama (even if he lied about the hope part), and he was actually black.
So I’d suggest that while racism matters, it isn’t determinative. Having a good candidate with a good message is.
This election shouldn’t be this close. It is because of the Democratic party chose a terrible candidate and ran a bad campaign.
Update (10:26 Eastern): Looking like Biden, unless Trump gets the Supremes to overturn it.
Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Well, we’re here. Feel free to use comments for discussion of the election.
So, the big day is nigh. Another 4 years of Trump, or four to eight years of Biden and whoever actually runs his administration?
Trump’s domestic record has been pretty bad. The economy was doing well before Covid-19, but his complete bungling of the response has thrown millions into poverty and enriched oligarchs. It was possible to control Covid, countries from New-Zealand to Vietnam have done far better jobs.
In terms of civil liberties Trump is even worse than Obama, which is saying something. Environmentally he’s a disaster (he just opened up an arctic reserve to roads and thus logging and mining, not his first such action.)
He hasn’t started any wars but he has ramped up droning and other types of bombing, again over Obama’s already insane levels (which were increased from Bush Jr’s.)
In foreign affairs, Trump has pursued a relatively unilateral policy, trade wars and so on. I don’t agree with all of it, and I think he’s pushing the US towards a cold war with China, but while Biden will be more multilateral, he will also push for a cold war with China (China’s not going to submit to American rules the way DC wants, so insisting it does means splitting the world in two.)
Biden’s very aggressive on foreign affairs, and is more likely to start a new war than Trump. He will be better environmentally though not enough to matter a great deal (his vow to not restrict fracking makes that clear), marginally better on civil liberties but will certainly continue the crack down on Black Lives Matters and other protests.
He will do better on Covid and he will give States relief and not try and cut States off from money the way that Trump is doing if he doesn’t approve of State actions.
While Biden is better on the environment and climate change it’s not enough to change the trajectory of runaway climate change, and he does block the possibility of a good candidate for longer than Trump, since the presumptive next candidate is Kamala Harris.
Both Trump and Biden are senile, but Biden is more likely to let other people run things.
Trump has been doing a fairly significant purge of the civil service over the last year, Biden will end this, and I think that’s overall good. His neoliberal apparatchniks are bad, but they are better than Liberty U grads, though that’s the lowest bar imaginable.
Biden’s likely staffing makes clear this is status quo ante—back to Obama, perhaps a bit more progressive in certain areas.
Because Biden is just status quo ante, he will not change the conditions which lead to Trump, and the next Republican candidate is likely to be a disciplined right wing “populist” and far more dangerous than Trump
As for the campaign, both sides have engaged in voter suppression (Dems against Greens) but the Republicans have engaged in far more of it, and I consider this a red line.
Summary: Biden’s better for most Americans, but definitely not all. He buys people time to make preparations, where Trump will continue the slide much harder. Trump is probably better for non-Americans in countries America is likely to invade, but only marginally. Iranians, for example, will do better under Biden.
Personally if I were American I’d vote for Biden if I were in a swing state, and third party if in a non-swing state (most of them.) In terms of future political activity, I’d probably look into the Democratic Socialists of America; more of the serious activists I respect call that home now than any other party.
Results. There’s no question Republicans are planning on taking this to the courts, preventing ballots from being counted whenever possible and so on, so this may not be determined soon. If it isn’t a blow-out, Trump will declare victory (like Pete Buttigieg did) and fight it out.
As for who will win, polls favor Biden. If you want the argument that the polls are wrong, this is a good version.
I don’t know, I gave up election prediction a while back, I’m bad at it now that I follow politics closely. I do think the odds are with Biden. But if it’s marginal the Republicans will steal it unless Americans take the streets in DC and force them not to.
Best of luck to all, Americans and not. Neither Biden nor Trump will be a good President, but may the one who will do the least harm win.
Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
by Tony Wikrent
See something? Report voter suppression and obstacles to voting.
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-8-20]
[Georgetown University, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-30-20]
“[F]act sheets for all 50 states explaining the laws barring unauthorized private militia groups and what to do if groups of armed individuals are near a polling place or voter registration drive.”
The Pandemic
Mark Meadows: U.S. ‘not going to control’ COVID-19 as nation adds 83,718 new cases
[UPI, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-20]
“An Oral History of the Day Everything Changed”
Garrett Graff [Wired, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-29-20]
“On March 11, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic seemed to crystallize in the national consciousness. Americans look back on the turning point.” • Interviews with Mark Cuban, Carolyn Maloney, Elise Stefanik, Douglas Brinkley, Scott Van Pelt, Dan Pfeiffer, Claudia Sahm, Peter Tuz. Gabriella Orr, Philip Rucker, Liz Cheney, and Royce Young, among others; PMCs and upwards. However, Our elites obviously don’t read Naked Capitalism:
- January 23: China Coronavirus Watch: Updated – Another Chinese City Locked Down to Prevent Spread.
- January 28: Coronavirus: Not Looking Good
- January 29: Dr. Victor Shih: Coronavirus MUCH Worse Than SARS
So, arguably, for the truly alert, March 11 was not the day everything changed, but January 23. (And our elites don’t read Taleb either; Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb published Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens – Coronavirus: A note on January 26, 2020.) So the question becomes: Why were our elites so oblivious?
Strategic Political Economy
What’s at stake? A short text on US elections
Branko Milanovic [globalinequality, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-20]
Serbian economist Milanovic originally wrote this for the Toronto Globe and Mail, but “They got what they apparently did not expect and wanted me to revise the text substantially. I am always happy to accept all factual and English-language corrections… But I do not accept changes in content. So I post the original text here.]
What are the stakes in the forthcoming US presidential election? I would put them in one word: “normalcy”. But as I write that word, I feel very uneasy…. The United States prior to Trump could hardly be described as having been in a desirable state of affairs. Not only that: it is that very “normalcy” that brought Trump to power in the first place. It is useful to refresh one’s memories. Under George W Bush, the US created endless wars that destabilized the Middle East and killed, according to some estimates, half a million people. Under the same president, it also produced the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. And then under the next president it bailed out those responsible for the crisis, sowed chaos in Libya, and ignored the decimation of the American middle class….
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén