With apologies to “The Wizard Of Oz”…

Ding-dong the con is gone!
Which damn con?
The con named Don.
Ding-dong the con named Don is gone!

Trump will be remembered as the absolute worst President in the history of our nation.  He will displace even James Buchanan, whose inept leadership set the stage for the Civil War.

It will, of course, take time to disinfect the White House – both literally and figuratively – and we are unfortunately still stuck with many of Trump’s acolytes.  To the bitter end, Senator Graham has remained a loyal lapdog, trying to shift blame for the attack on the U.S. Capitol away from his master in absentia.

But at least Trump himself no longer wields the power the President of the United States.  That privilege has now been passed to the better man who defeated him in a fair election.  I trust President Biden to be a worthy steward of American democracy; Trump was always in it only for himself.

Back in 2017, in a letter to Trump that I later posted to this blog, I called him a “puerile, narcissistic boor”.  In 2021, I’ll acknowledge the playground limits of Trump’s vocabulary and simply repeat one of his own favorite epithets:

Mr. Trump:  You’re a Loser.

… And your little dog, too.

Last night’s Trump-incited mob takeover of the U.S. Capitol overshadowed some rather significant political bottom lines:

• Joe Biden will be sworn in as President on January 20.
• The dual Senate wins in Georgia will create a 50/50 split in that chamber.  Since VP Harris will be able to break any party-line votes, Democrats will have effective control of the Senate.
• Democrats will retain control of the House with a 51.3% majority.

Thus, in less than two weeks, Democrats will have command – albeit a very fragile command – of both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.  More importantly, the Cult of Trump will command neither branch.

Cool.

As a result:

• Biden will have a much easier time getting his cabinet picks approved.
• Neither chamber will be wasting time and money pursuing idiotic election investigations for the sake of political theater.
• Democrats will be able to fill judicial openings to make up a little ground on the Republican court-packing accomplished over the past four years.  (Note, by the way, that I will be just as critical of unqualified Democratic picks as I was of unqualified Republican picks.)

However, it’s not like Democrats will be able to run completely amok.

• The Supreme Court will remain firmly conservative for the foreseeable future.  In fact, a few of the current Justices are well beyond a conservative judicial philosophy and are blatantly partisan Republicans.
• Pelosi’s majority in the House is paper thin and Schumer will have nowhere near the control over Democratic Senators that McConnell had over Republican Senators.  While there will be some party-line votes in the new Congress, bipartisan solutions will at least be a possibility.
• There are many institutionalist Democrats in the Senate.  There will be no elimination of the filibuster.  Republicans will retain an effective veto on all but confirmations and a few budget bills passed by reconciliation.
• There are many moderate Democrats in both chambers.  There will be no wholesale majority move to the far left.  There will be no expansion of the Supreme Court.
• Intra-party conflicts will impact the ability of Democrats to put a majority together on anything.  In addition, any death, resignation, serious illness, or simple absence could completely change the Congressional math.

In short, effective federal government will still be difficult at best and will require cooperation across the board.  I’ve decided to be cautiously optimistic for no reason whatsoever.  I’m just tired of being mad.

On the other hand, we must not forget that Trump is still the President at the moment and he can still wreck considerable havoc on our nation before he departs.

Thirteen days and counting…

It’s not like I haven’t been paying attention since last I posted to this blog.  It’s just that, once again, most of the events in TrumpLand over the past few weeks have been incredibly predictable.

• Trump inflaming his base with evidence-free allegations of multi-state election fraud.  Check.
• Trump & Company filing massive numbers of election lawsuits only to see them denied or tossed out.  Check.
• Trump obsessing over his loss while his administration continues to bungle the vaccine rollout.  Check.
• Trump handing out pardons, appointments, and medals like candy to anyone who kisses his ass.  Check.
• Trump firing or threatening anyone who passes up even one ass-kiss opportunity – even those who have spent years with their lips firmly glued to Trump’s ample derrière.  Check.

I even expected a few far-right nutjobs might merrily indulge Trump’s fantasies and attempt the ultimate subjugation of kissing Trump’s ass from inside his colon.  Sen. Hawley (R-MO) and Rep. Gohmert (R-TX) were always prime candidates to object to today’s Congressional count of the Electoral votes.

Of course, there have been a few things that I didn’t expect.

• Trump not invoking the National Emergencies Act to wreck havoc on, well, everything.  Unfortunately, he still has plenty of time to do this.
• Trump casting so much Republican doubt on the election process that he appears to have single-handedly given Democrats control of the Senate by allowing both Georgia seats to flip – seats that would have been imminently winnable by the Republican incumbents in a Trump-less world.
• Over a quarter of the sitting Republican Senators joining in an effort to completely disregard the will of American voters.

That last one that is, by far, the most worrisome of all.

Trump was always going to be a sore loser and a sore loser with the power of the Presidency was always going to be dangerous.  Serious abuses of power and derelictions of duties were to be expected.  And it will undoubtedly get worse.  The hope has been that we could somehow survive the chaos until January 20.

And yet, today, we have the United States Congress.

At last count, thirteen Republican Senators led by Sen. Cruz (R-TX) – Senators who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States – have disregarded their oath by refusing to accept the Electoral votes duly certified by multiple states solely because they don’t like the results.

To make matters much worse, the Senators’ actions – and Trump’s blessing – have caused a Trump-supporting mob to breach security on Capitol Hill.  Lawmakers are currently being escorted to safety away from the Capitol.  I’m watching this play out on television right now and am appalled by what I’m seeing.

The spurious allegations of fraud have been adjudicated by multiple courts and each state has submitted a single set of certified Electors to Congress in accordance with the Constitution.  Today’s Senate action is intended to be a Constitutional formality.  The job of the Senate is merely to count the states’ votes; it is not their job to second-guess the states’ decisions.  If the Senate was indeed vested with the power to unilaterally decide which states’ votes they want to count, then Presidential elections would be rendered utterly meaningless.

Even though the efforts of the Republican Senators seem doomed to fail given the current makeup of Congress, even a futile attempt by multiple Senators to overturn the election results is well beyond a dangerous precedent.  It is well beyond a difference of political opinion.  It is well beyond a protest vote.  It is well beyond a political stunt to court favor with Trump’s base.

It is sedition.

Federal code defines Seditious Conspiracy as two or more citizens that conspire to overthrow the Government of the United States.  The act is punishable by 20 years in prison.  In 1861, ten Senators were expelled from the Senate for refusing to accept Lincoln’s election.  We know how that turned out.

Short of civil war, I hope we don’t just let this pass without consequences.

I have a very good friend who voted for Trump in 2016.  Although I purposely haven’t asked, I fully suspect that she did so again in 2020.  However, despite being a no-questions-asked Republican, she is otherwise a remarkably decent, fun, intelligent human being whom I trust implicitly.  Imagine that.

Anyway, I remember talking to her the day after the 2016 election.  While I was mostly just numb, my friend wanted to complain about how she felt seriously harassed by the women in her office – most of whom had worn pantsuits that day in solidarity with Hillary Clinton.  My friend wasn’t joking.  She felt threatened.

Those of us who were on the losing side of the election were in shock and mourning.  We certainly didn’t like the outcome, but we weren’t in denial and we weren’t questioning the results.  We were sad for ourselves and for our country and we were searching for a way to deal with it as best we could – some, apparently, with a sartorial choice.

I found myself actually having to remind my friend that her candidate WON.  While she should have been ecstatic, she only felt aggrieved.  My soul was crushed; my friend felt persecuted by Anne Klein.

Since I fear that my friend might be among the 52% of Republicans who still believe that Trump won again this year, avoidance of the topic has thus far been my preferred approach.  While I’ll eventually need to have the associated discussion, I’m focused for the moment on the larger, sadder landscape inside which my friend is perhaps one blade of red grass.

While the 2016 elections saw the Republican party take complete control of the both the Executive and Legislative branches of the country, many Republicans still managed to feel victimized.  While Clinton gave a nice concession speech the very next day and offered to work with Trump on behalf of our country, this set of Republicans still wanted more.  They weren’t content to just win.  They weren’t content to just have their win acknowledged.  They would have only been content if the losers recognized that their win was righteous.  Even in victory, Republicans remained combative.  There could be no Loyal Opposition.  Any opposition was a threat.

And this was after an election that they won.

Since many Republicans thought that life was massively unfair to them after a 2016 win, their entrenched denial of a 2020 loss was all too predictable.  A majority of Republicans continue to be persuaded that any election they lose is rigged by definition.

In reality, American elections ARE rigged – but in favor of Republicans:

• Our founders saw the U.S. Senate as the means to guarantee that all states  would retain a voice in the federal government.  Thus, California’s 40M people and Montana’s 1M people are both represented by two Senators each.  This was by design.
• On the other hand, the U.S. House was intended to be the people’s chamber but the founders didn’t foresee gerrymandering.  Thus, Republicans won only 48% of Wisconsin’s 2020 vote but walked away with 63% of its U.S. House seats.  (While Democrats have also gerrymandered states, Republicans have turned it into an art form that is far more pervasive.)
• In Presidential elections, the antiquated Electoral College has turned into a perversion of democracy where some voters are demonstrably more important than others.  Thus, while every 670K people in New York get exactly one Electoral Vote, every 192K people in Wyoming get the same one vote.  In other words,  a Presidential voter in Wyoming is 3.5 times more important than a voter in New York.  The fact is that Biden received over 6 million more American votes than Trump.  It is ludicrous that we’re still discussing this election.

The authors of our Constitution intended it to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority; they did not intend it to enable the tyranny of the minority.

While I’m worried about the sheer number of Republicans that don’t appear willing to accept electoral math, I’ll grant that there are fringes in both parties that will always be unable to accept any reality that doesn’t match their expectations.  The fact that one of those fringes is led by the President of the United States is, for the moment, beside the point.  I’ll also gloss over the additional fact that the rest of the leadership of the Republican party has made the political choice to placate Trump’s base rather than defend democratic norms and demand an orderly transition.

Of much greater concern to me is that there are sane, smart, good people within the Republican party who sincerely believe that they are perennially oppressed when the numbers indicate that they themselves are the oppressors.  Furthermore, this year’s Republican statehouse wins virtually guarantee the continuation of Republican oppression for another decade.

To put it bluntly, that sucks.  I don’t like it at all.  However, I accept that reality and I’ll work within the system to overcome it where possible and change it over time.  That’s the way democracy works.

Conversely, Republicans need to recognize that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.  There was no grand conspiracy to deny Trump the second term to which he thinks he was divinely entitled.  Democrats did not steal the Presidency; they won it.  That’s also the way democracy works.

It is well past time for good Republicans to stop playing the victim card.

And I guess it’s also time to have that discussion with my friend.

As promised, I took a deeper look at the two Georgia Senate runoff elections.  Assuming that Biden foils the Kansas City Shuffle, Democrats need to win both Georgia races for a 50/50 split in the U.S. Senate – and thus claim the narrowest possible Senate control with VP Harris as the tie-breaker.  Conversely, Republicans need to win only one of the races to give McConnell and company virtual veto power over all Democratic appointments and legislation.  The stakes are high.

While there are two distinct races in Georgia, the two candidates from each party are obviously joined at the hip in the eyes of many voters.  We can thus primarily focus on the political dynamics in Georgia that aren’t race-specific.

It seems clear that there are precious few minds that could actually be changed in Georgia.  The state is even more polarized along party lines than the rest of the country – and that’s a significant accomplishment.  Looking at the top of the last two statewide tickets (Governor in 2018, President in 2020), only one of 159 counties changed their party preference.  [Washington County, with about 10K votes in 2020, saw a very narrow R win in 2018 and a very narrow D win in 2020.]  As of this writing, Biden won Georgia by only about 14K votes – or about 0.3%.  It’s thus also clear that the party polarization is a pretty even split.

The New Georgia Project does claim to have identified around 100K potential new voters to register ahead of the 12/7 runoff voter registration deadline.  The Civics Center says that around a quarter of them are young voters who were ineligible to vote on 11/3 but will turn 18 in time to vote in the runoff.  The assumption is that a vast majority of these new voters would favor Democrats and, given that about 4.9M Georgia votes were cast in 2020, a potential 2% additional votes could well make a difference.

In any case, the runoffs will be all about turnout.  The problem is that, despite public confidence on both sides, no one has the slightest clue who has the upper hand.

Georgia’s Republican candidates do have a very long history of winning runoff elections.  Most notably, in 1992, the popular Democratic Sen. Fowler won 49.2% of the vote in the general election, beating his Republican opponent by 6 points.  However, Fowler lost the runoff 49.4% to 50.6%.  That said, the 2020 election is so different on so many levels that history is likely not a valid predictor.

Will 2020 Republicans turn out without Trump at the top of the ticket?  For that matter, will 2020 Democrats turn out without Trump at the top of the ticket?  Will local issues overshadow control of the U.S. Senate or will it be completely the opposite?  What will be the impact of the massive amounts of out-of-state money and surrogates on both sides?

It remains to be seen what involvement Trump himself will have in the Georgia runoffs.  As with everything, it will be all about him either way.  We know that Trump doesn’t give a crap about Senate control at this point.  However, if he thinks he can claim credit for wins in Georgia, he’ll be there.  If not, he’ll be occupied elsewhere.  Trump’s involvement would likely motivate turnout from both parties but with the net advantage going to Republicans.  While it’s unlikely that any other non-Georgia Republican could be a major factor as a surrogate, Republicans do have Karl Rove leading their fundraising parade.  Despite being an asshole, he’s pretty good at that kind of thing.

Stacey Abrams will continue to play a leading role for Georgia Democrats – and she did a phenomenal job in the general election. The party will hopefully feature Barack and Michelle Obama as the external draws with Harris liberally deployed to represent the Biden administration.  Biden himself might make a token appearance but, frankly, Biden’s personal involvement will have little impact on turnout and he should now focus more on governing than politics.

Individually, the two Georgia Senate races in the general election were quite different.

In the “standard” 2020 election, there were three candidates on the ballot.  Perdue (R) received 49.7% of the vote.  Ossoff (D) has a tough road to increase his 48.0% to a majority.  While it’s likely that the bulk of the Libertarian’s 2.3% will favor Ossoff in the runoff, Ossoff really needs a sweep of those votes.

In the “special” 2020 election, there were a whopping 20 candidates on the ballot.  Warnock (D) got a plurality of 32.9% and he’ll face Loeffler (R) in the runoff.  While Loeffler got only 25.9%, all of the Republican candidates together got 49.2% of the vote.  Democrats combined for 48.4% with 2.4% going to a smattering of other parties.  Warnock also needs most of the third-party votes.

In both head-to-head races, the Republican is not only the incumbent, but the opposing Democrat starts from a vote deficit in the general election.  Again, however, it will be all about turnout.  If Republicans can attract the most repeat voters – as they’ve done in the past – they’ll win.  If Democrats have the most repeat voters – and bring in new voters – they’ll win.  If both parties produce the same voters that they did in the general election, the race could be decided by the fringe party voters.  However, it’s not at all clear that these voters will make the effort to show up for either major party candidate.

I thought about trying to build a predictive model for both races, but there’s just too many variables that don’t lend themselves to analytics. Polls will continue to be conducted in Georgia but all will be worthless.

Intuitively, I’d guess that Republicans have significant advantages in both runoff races.  However, since Georgia was the one state that I got wrong in the Presidential election, I’m not inclined to listen to me.

Instead, I’ll just throw some money in the general direction of Georgia and pray to whatever Gods might still care about the truly pathetic political situation that engulfs my country.

For those that might also be inclined to pitch in, I’m donating to:

• The two Democratic campaigns:
  • Jon Ossoff
  • Raphael Warnock
• Abrams’ organization, focused on general Democratic turnout:
  • Fair Fight

 

Democrats are falling for the Kansas City Shuffle.

No, neither Missouri nor Kansas are somehow in play in the 2020 Presidential Election.  The Kansas City Shuffle is a con game that requires its marks to be aware that they are being conned but being wrong about how they are being conned.  The fake con is actually a misdirection trap for the real con.

Here’s the set up:  Excluding five states, the Electoral College count is pretty even at 233 for Democrats and 232 for Republicans.  The five states, with their Elector counts and the popular vote differences as of 11/11 – ALL favoring Democrats – are:

We can ignore the facts that the deltas all show big leads by Biden and that all of the states except Georgia have been called for Biden.  Facts, you see, are irrelevant to the con.

The Republican misdirection comes from four angles:

Misdirection #1:  Fraud Allegations

Republicans – at least the ones with multi-digit IQs – know that they have zero proof of any significant fraudulent activity that could swing even one of the five states.  If there was such evidence, we’d be hearing it repeated 24×7 on Fox News.  Besides, if Democrats were brilliant enough to pull off widespread election fraud – changing the Presidential election results in five different states by over a quarter of a million votes – why the hell didn’t they swing the House, Senate, and State Legislative elections while they were at it?  Were Democrats unbelievably clever enough to conduct the fraud but too damn stupid to realize that there were other races on the same ballots?

The answer is that Republicans aren’t actually trying to prove any fraud whatsoever.  The substance of the allegations is irrelevant; only the volume of the allegations is important.  They serve to keep the GOP base enraged that Democrats are trying to steal what they are being told is rightfully theirs.  On the other hand, the involvement of the Justice Department to investigate these spurious allegations – blithely politicizing a department that is supposed to be apolitical and causing the resignation of career officials in protest – isn’t actually meant to identify any fraud.  It serves only to further enrage Democrats and keep them occupied.

Misdirection #2:  Process Lawsuits

Republicans are also in court with non-fraud lawsuits.  The most public of these is in Pennsylvania where Republicans have challenged the arrival extension of mailed ballots that were postmarked by election day.  This has gone through both the state and U.S. Supreme Courts and isn’t yet fully resolved.  The fact that these ballots have been segregated and aren’t counted in the published totals doesn’t matter to Republicans.

The GOP is batting zero thus far with process lawsuits, but again, it doesn’t matter.  They are only looking to generate noise, command news cycles, and keep both camps angry.

Misdirection #3:  Recounts

Republicans will demand every recount they can.  In some cases we’ll have recounts of the recounts.  Under pressure from Republicans, Georgia is even conducting a very time-consuming manual recount that is much more prone to error than automated counts.  No one, however, actually expects any results to change.

In the past 20 years, the average shift in votes from all statewide recounts nationwide is 430 votes.  The largest shift was less than 2,600 votes.  To change the results in the closest state (Arizona), Trump would require a shift of about 5X the largest recorded in two decades.  To change the results in the state with the most Electors (Pennsylvania), the shift would need to be over 18X.  Michigan would require a 56X shift.

No, the purpose of the recounts is not to win the recounts.  They serve only to kill time and to enable bogus claims that even small count differences provide “evidence” supporting the narrative that all of the vote counts are questionable.

Misdirection #4:  Transition Drama

Trump and Company are going out of their way to flip off Biden and the Democrats.  By actively politicizing the Departments of Justice, Defense, and State, by withholding transition funding from Biden, by refusing to even provide briefings to Biden and his team, by not even putting a contingency plan in place for an Executive Branch hand-off, Republicans are getting a ton of media attention, feeding their base, pissing off Democrats, and issuing warnings to any Republicans that may feel wary about participating in the con.  Governing isn’t on the table.  It never was.  The only thing that’s surprising is that this crap still surprises us.

All of the above misdirection attempts may themselves seem important.  They are not.  While trying to turn the U.S. military into a political tool is obviously concerning, I trust our senior military officers to defend the Constitution, not Trump.  No, the misdirection attempts merely support the fake con.  They are intended only to take everyone’s eyes off of what Constitutionally happens next.

Legislatures in each state need to certify their Presidential elections and choose which slate of Electors will represent their state in the Electoral College.  Each state has their own date by which they are required to certify a Presidential election but none can be later than the federally-mandated “Safe Harbor” deadline of December 8.  The Electoral College votes on December 14.

While the selection of Electors has always mirrored a state’s popular vote, states are not Constitutionally bound to do so.  Note at this point that both legislative chambers in all of the above five states are controlled by Republicans.  Current legal theory suggests that a state legislature would have had to claim the right to select Electors themselves prior to a popular election that was specifically conducted to select them.  However, a final ruling on that would be made by the U.S. Supreme Court – which was recently stacked by Republicans.  While the Court might be at least a bit hesitant to produce such a blatantly partisan ruling, they could claim that the above chaos dictates that each state should be allowed to set their own rules as they see fit, and Trump would be re-elected.

Alternatively, if the chaos in a given state isn’t sufficient for their legislature to avoid the political fallout of completely reversing the will of their voters, they could simply fail to certify the election and thus choose no Electors at all.  If enough states fail to identify Electors, it is possible that neither Biden nor Trump would get the necessary 270 Electoral votes to win.  In that case, the election would be thrown to the U.S. House – with each state getting one vote.  Since Republicans have a majority in a majority of the state delegations in the House, Trump would be re-elected.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party holds the necessary cards to simply disregard the will of the voters.  They just need everyone to be looking elsewhere while they do it.

The Republican con is to delay, obscure, enrage, and delay some more until the state legislatures need to certify their Electors.  Everything they are now doing is purely to provide cover for the Republican-controlled legislatures to claim that, since the popular vote count isn’t yet resolved in their state, they are “forced” to act themselves and will expect the U.S. Supreme Court to back them.

Republicans only need the con to succeed in enough states to get them to 270 or to make sure that no one gets to 270. That implies legislative action – or inaction – in at least three of the five states.  If they can do it, Trump gets a second term.

So what can be done to derail the Shuffle?  It may not be sufficient, but Democrats at least need to recognize the fake con and focus exclusively on the real one.

The Democratic response should not be to fight fraud allegations in the media, delay lawsuits with legal tactics, oppose recounts, or demand transition assistance.  In fact, the Democratic response should be exactly the opposite.  They should loudly proclaim:  “Okay.  Bring it.  Bring it now!”

• You have serious allegations of fraud?  File as many lawsuits as you want.  Just file them now and we’ll concurrently file to expedite the cases in court.  If there really is widespread fraud that can be proven, we want to know about it just as much as you do.  We’re not fully convinced we didn’t win by even bigger margins.  In fact, we’ll go to court ourselves in each of the five states – and to the U.S. Supreme Court – to force the quick filing of all fraud lawsuits so that there will be sufficient time to resolve every last one of them well before the Safe Harbor deadline.
• You want to do a manual recount in Georgia?  Cool.  Let’s concurrently do an automated recount as well so that we’ll have three totals.  We want the most accurate count as well.  We’ll also go to court here to require that all state recounts be highly transparent and completed by the Safe Harbor deadline.  That’s already the law – we’re just making sure.  In fact, if there’s a cost issue, we’ll pay for the recounts.
• You want to argue about ballot arrival extensions?  Fine.  In fact, let’s fast-track all process issues directly to the Supreme Court right now.  We want every issue quickly resolved.
• You don’t want to provide any transition assistance?  Okay.  It’s not a law.  A smooth transition is certainly in the best interest of the country, but yeah, we know you don’t give a shit.  We’ll do just fine without your help.  We know you intend to burn the place down if you’re forced out.  Do what you’re going to do.  We’ll rebuild.

In no case should there be any Democratic obstruction of any of the Republican delaying tactics.  Democrats won and have nothing to hide.  By the time each state legislature needs to certify the election results, Democrats will have done everything in their power to finalize the popular vote totals in each of the five states while shining a spotlight on everything.

Unfortunately, Democrats can’t take away the Republican cards.  They can only make Republicans pay to play them and hope that’s enough.

One of my first posts in this iteration of my blog was an open letter to Trump.  I stated my opposition to both his agenda and his approach, but I also explicitly noted that, despite a closer election in 2016, I was “not looking for ways to call into question the legitimacy of your presidency.  That’s the way our democracy works.”

I may be seriously naïve, but I want to believe that enough Republicans still understand the meaning of democracy as well.  Republican “leadership” appears to be gleefully complicit in the execution of the con since its success would be best for them.  All of them were apoplectic over Hillary Clinton having the audacity to wait until the day after the 2016 election to concede; all of them will remain fully supportive of Trump’s refusal to do so for as long as he wants.

Perhaps, however, enough of the rank-and-file still believe that accepting the results of free elections is a cornerstone of the American experiment.

We’ll see.

I composed a post in the wee hours of 11/4.  It was an incoherent mess of incredulous, pissed off, and suicidal.  It was not my best work.  I’m thankful that some internal voice quietly suggested that I delay publication.  That draft has since been deleted.

I made the decision to not try again until there was a bit more certainty.  Like Toby Ziegler, I had no desire to “tempt the wrath of whatever from high atop the thing” by making hasty assumptions about final outcomes.  I’m still processing all that has transpired and I remain quite anxious to see how things will progress from here.  Trump will not go gentle into that good night.

I’ll have more to say at a later date.  For now, I’ll simply share some big picture thoughts in the form of an early review of my own predictions.

Presidential Election

Earlier this year, as I tweaked my own predictive model of the 2020 Electoral College, I made a conscious choice to underweight polling.  In our current world, I was unconvinced that any pollster could correctly define a “likely voter” upon which to base a valid sample.  I thus over-weighted state-level data on voting histories, party control, demographics, the 2016 & 2018 elections, etc.  In the end, my final predictions were pretty close.  Georgia currently appears to be the only state that will be an outlier from my model – and that vote count will be ridiculously close.

I also accurately predicted the timing shifts for the vote counts in some swing states – although the amplitude of the initial R shifts surprised me to the point of panic.  Luckily, at least some of them were later offset by D waves of equal or greater intensity.

All that said, I simply cannot bring myself to excessively celebrate my model’s decent accuracy.  Indeed, none of my analytical efforts prevented me from secretly harboring a desire that my model would be proven wildly wrong.  I found myself hoping – with zero data to back it up – that America would send a resounding message that, even in our polarized political world, there were clear limits to what we would tolerate from a President of the United States.  While I’m certainly thankful that the message appears to have been delivered, it was hardly in the full voice that I expected from my country.  I’ll need some time to ponder that.

U.S. Senate

My Senate model – again with polling averages under-weighted – was also fairly accurate.  The outliers skewed to Republicans.

• While I’d noted that Cunningham’s extramarital affair could hurt him, I didn’t alter my model to take it into account.  My bad.  Frankly, if I lived in North Carolina, I couldn’t have voted for him, either.
• I was wrong about Collins in Maine.  I did not see an easy path to her re-election – particularly given Maine’s ranked choice voting.  However, Collins won by an impressive margin. For curiosity’s sake, I might dig into the numbers at some point to see where my model went awry.

Both Georgia Senate seats appear headed to a run-off and, if Democrats can somehow pull off two wins, the resultant 50/50 split would give Democrats control of the chamber.  I’ll take a closer look at these races later but, for now, I’m not holding my breath.

U.S. House

The R wave in the House caught me completely by surprise.  Here, I was mostly lazy.  I failed to do the district-by-district research that I did for the competitive 2018 races and I casually assumed that polling averages at the district level would be more accurate than their broader cousins.  In retrospect, that was a rotten assumption on many levels.  Apparently, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership in the House were similarly lazy.  There’s just one difference: IT WASN’T MY JOB.

I don’t know yet if the problem was bad messaging, flawed candidates, lack of focus, or some combination of the above.  However, it’s already obvious that leadership tried too hard to expand their majority at the expense of defending the one they had.  With a more-than-sufficient pile of cash and a winner at the top of the ticket, losing that many House seats is inexcusable.

Texas State House

I knew it was a very long shot for Democrats to fill the double inside straight necessary to win this chamber.  However, I also didn’t expect them to just fold.  Democrats won zero of the seats they targeted.  Ouch.

Other State Legislative Chambers

I didn’t weigh in here except to note the seven chambers that were in play.  Democrats failed to flip a single one.  Long term, this is probably the most important result of the election.  Republicans will be able to gerrymander the crap out of multiple states (Texas included) to guarantee their party a decade-long advantage at both the state level and in the U.S. House.  Ouch again.

Coda

Democrats do appear to have prevented another four years of a Trump administration.  That is a very good thing and is worthy of some celebration.  Overall, however, Democrats got their butts handed to them.  They just haven’t fully realized it yet.

Republicans, on the other hand, had a really, really good election.  They just won’t see it that way.

2020.