One Day, Lawsuits to Follow

Democracy Count Down: Just another campaign weekend.  Trump held as many large rallies as possible, ignoring the raging coronavirus as well as the study out of Stanford linking 30,000 cases and 700 deaths to his super spreader fests.   Biden with the help of Barack Obama, or as Trump snidely calls him HUSSEIN Obama, hit the road too, only his rallies were socially distanced, face masked affairs.  Since Trump only needs his voters to survive until tomorrow, he stranded thousands more of them, this time in Pittsburgh where once again his logistics people failed to provide enough buses to transport them back to their cars. Hey, it was only 41 degrees, and some of them had gloves so no bigly.  A bus company representative said that they had been told they would be paid when they dropped off the rally goers but they weren’t and having heard that the campaign had stiffed other bus companies,  they’d left the crowd of YMCA singers to fend for themselves.  The Biden team didn’t freeze, boil or infect any of their fans, but nevertheless on Saturday some on the Texas Biden squad earned a few new gray hairs when their campaign bus was surrounded, harassed and almost forced off the road by a caravan of Trump supporters outside San Antonio.  The local police did nothing just because but the FBI is now investigating.  Of course, Trump defended his trucking fanboys tweeting “In  my opinion those patriots did nothing  wrong, the FBI and Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists and ANTIFA who run around burning down Democrat run cities and hurting our people.”  And to be clear by “our people,” he means only those people who support him with their SUVS, trucks or boats.  As to ANTIFA, they might be lurking somewhere and they may well have some nasty plans for later in the week, but they weren’t among the MAGA flag flying crowd that screwed up traffic on a New Jersey highway or on the Mario Cuomo Bridge outside of NYC this weekend.  Apparently the MAGgots did that because nothing convinces blue state voters to change their votes more than a good old fashioned traffic jam.  Ask former NJ Governor Christie about that.  To understate the obvious, tomorrow is likely to be an exceptionally unusual election day.

No Vote For You:  As to election day, to paraphrase Russian author Leo Tolstoy organized states count votes quickly, the others are dysfunctional in their own ways.  Nate Silver, the statistician who runs the FiveThirtyEight website, says that we should have a “pretty good idea of where things are headed on election night, even if no candidate is able to clinch 270 electoral votes until later in the week.”  He adds that “we should get near-complete results in Florida in a matter of hours; Arizona and North Carolina will release the vast majority of their ballots very quickly, although if the race is too close to call they may not provide a final answer for days. Georgia and Texas should tally most ballots on November 3, but counting may stretch into Wednesday or Thursday. We should know the winner in Wisconsin by Wednesday morning; Michigan and Pennsylvania, by contrast, will probably take until the end of the week.”  Nothing to worry about there, except that the Republicans may appeal a Texas Supreme court decision allowing the inclusion of 127,000  drive-in votes and, according to AXIOS, Trump plans to prematurely declare victory if it looks like the votes counted on election day show him leading, something that’s quite possible because  in states like swingy Pennsylvania the expectation is that Election Day voters will lean Republican while late counted absentee ballots will lean Democrat.  Trump’s view is that “it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election…..it's a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over." To put that into football speak, that would be like declaring a victory at half time because your team was winning. It’s unlikely that the mainstream media will totally fall for Trump’s ruse, though they will build it up as much as they can to keep us on the edge of our seats and to provoke some of the unhinged to grab their AK 47s and then there’s always all those Trump friendly Fox pundits, Sinclair and OAN.  By the way, if Trump wasn’t scared sh-tless about losing, why would he be so into truncating voter counts, suppressing voters and saying that as necessary he’ll get his lawyers to upend election results?

Senatorial Games :  With Trump sucking all the air out of the universe its easy to forget Tuesday is also about control of the Senate and about how many more seats Speaker Pelosi can get out on the House side.  On the Senate front, a few of the races will be particularly quirky.  In Maine, because the state now uses ranked choice voting, if either incumbent Senator Susan Collins or her Democratic challenger Sara Gideon fails to get 50% of the vote, the vote tally for the top two finishers, presumably Collins and Gideon, will be recomputed including voters’ second choice preferences. That could benefit challenger Gideon because the progressive Green party candidate who is currently polling in third place, albeit with only 5% or so of the vote,  has told her voters to pick Gideon as their second choice.  In Georgia, to win a candidate has to clear 50% of the vote so not only it expected that tomorrow’s special election for the seat that former Senator Johnny Isakson vacated for health reasons will end up in a run off, between either Republican Doug Collins or space-filler Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and the leading Democratic contender Raphael Warnock but it’s quite likely that the regular election between Senator David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff will also end up in a run off as right now its not clear that either of them will obtain 50% of the vote due to the participation of a third party candidate.  Those run off elections, which could be key to deciding who controls the Senate, are scheduled to take place in early January.  Lastly, if, as expected former astronaut Mark Kelly trounces current space filler Arizona Senator Martha McSally, he will be seated by the end of November.  McSally’s demise is so expected that Trump, ever the gentleman, granted her a whole minute of speaking time during his last Arizona rally before turning the podium over to Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee, neither of whom are up for reelection this year, and Nigel Farage, the British Brexit advocate, not that anyone in the crowd knew or cared who he was.  

Et Cetera:  Trump’s favorite coronavirus expert, herd immunity advocate Scott Atlas, gave a lengthy interview to the Kremlin backed media outlet RT.  When informed that he’d just been used by Putin, he tweet apologized “I was unaware they are a registered foreign agent “I regret doing the interview and apologize for allowing myself to be taken advantage of. I especially apologize to the national security community who is working hard to defend us.” Notably, Atlas who appears to be as ignorant about international affairs as he is about epidemiology didn’t apologize for telling those RT folks that masks are useless and that maximizing, rather than minimizing, infection rates is the way to go.  On the expert front, Trump led a few rounds of “Fire Fauci” chants last night, an indication that the real virus guru might be shoved out the door as early as next week. #Sigh