I am heartsick, as I’m sure most of you are. I had such hope we could move forward. Now we’re about to sink into a muck of corruption and ignorance. You probably know we’ve also lost the Senate. We still don’t know which party will take the House, so there’s still some hope House Democrats can put a brake on some things the MAGAts will try to do.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic reminds us that Democracy is not over. But we have a lot of work to do to save it.

And I need some time before I can write any more. Do feel free to express yourselves in the comments.

While we’re waiting for the first returns, do catch this bit from Rachel Maddow from last night. She doesn’t say that Elon Musk should be stripped of his citizenship and deported, but I am.

Musk is creating a serious national security problem.

As the returns come in, this map shows how states are expected to vote. As of 8:20 pm EST there haven’t been any surprises. The “swing” states are pastel. For the interactive feature you’ll need to find the map on the original page, here.

(9:30 pm EST) I was hoping the early returns would show some patterns that departed from the polls, but so far it’s been pretty much what was expected, close. And it’s probably the case that it will be a few hours if not days before the swing states are called.

Again, if results in all the not-swing states match what was predicted, Harris’s best chance is to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That takes her to 270. If she falls short in Pennsylvania she will need Georgia plus Nevada or North Carolina plus Nevada (and Michigan and Wisconsin). It may really come down to Pennsylvania. But I don’t expect any calls for a few hours, and I need a break from Steve Kornacki. If any swing states are called while I’m taking a break, do add it to the comments.

Update: It’s 3 am, and I woke up and checked the news. The nation just committed suicide. I can’t cope with this.

I’ve decided it’s okay to indulge in optimism. It is very possible the polls are wrong, especially regarading Kamala Harris’s base of support. See Justin Brown at Politico, for example, who argues there are Harris voters the pollsters are missing.

In this election cycle, pollsters have made a clear effort to explore various methodologies that enable a deeper dive into Trump’s areas of support that were previously underrepresented in past polling. But when asked about the challenge of tracking an abbreviated Harris campaign in the wake of an historic candidate swap, some pollsters believed that the polling transition from Biden to Harris would be “relatively seamless.”

Justin Brown makes a persuasive argument that the polling companies, who had adjusted and fine-tuned how they “weighted” the data to be sure they were not undercounting Trump voters, have no clue about Harris voters. For example, the much discussed Ann Selzer poll that shows Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa found that older voters, expecially women, were moving in the direction of Harris. Many are also questioning if the pollsters have fully integrated the effect of the Dobbs decision into their projections. See Marcy Wheeler,  Male Pollsters Shocked — Shocked!! — When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters.

It’s also the case that a lot of those older women are registered Republicans. And this takes us to another question — are the pollsters finding the “Liz Cheney” Republicans who are voting for Harris to stop Trump? See Josh Marshall on this point.

See also Final GOP push in Pennsylvania focuses on imaginary voters over real ones by Philip Bump at WaPo. He observed GOTV activity in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

As I did in 2016 and 2020, I traveled to Scranton to see how the campaigns were tackling this task. Both of my prior visits were, at least in retrospect, revealing. In 2016, I was surprised to see little activity for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a bustling turnout operation for Donald Trump. Four years later, it was Joe Biden — who often speaks of the time he spent in Scranton as a child — who was running an effective operation. Trump’s supporters seemed to be more focused on handing out lawn signs and boisterous parades of trucks.

In other words, in 2016 and 2020, the campaigns with the more robust GOTV field operations in Scranton (and presumably across the state) ended up winning. In Scranton in 2024, that was clearly the operation being run by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and its allies.

On the other hand, volunteers at a Trump office were being trained to be poll watchers, not canvassers.

Those volunteers, though, weren’t going out to turn out voters. Instead, Medeiros was helping them fill out the documents they’d need to be poll watchers on Election Day. Others were being trained to be greeters, welcoming people at polling places and providing information about Republican candidates. The focus was on managing those who came out to vote, not on making sure they came out in the first place.

Back in April, the then-new co-chair of the Republican Party, the Republican nominee’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, made clear that poll-watching would be a central focus for the party in November. It was an institutional bet on the idea that Trump’s 2020 loss was attributable not to having more Biden voters turn out, but to that pro-Biden majority being a function of some wrongdoing at the polls. Never mind that there were poll watchers in 2020, too (including some I spoke to then). The party would in 2024 have its volunteers combat imaginary illegal voters instead of turning out real, legal ones.

Well, we’ll see how that worked, or not, by the end of this week. Maybe the election will be a squeaker. But it’s very possible that the polls are wrong, and if so they are more likely undercounting Harris support than Trump support.

Looking at the closeness of the election from another angle — Matt Yglesias, in the New York Times, points out that around the world post-pandemic voters are turning out incumbents. This applies to both left-wing and right-wing incumbents. And this is mostly about inflation, apparently.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living. The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists. But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government.

Harris is swimming against the tide, so to speak. Yglesias thinks the real question ought to be, not why is it so close? but why isn’t Trump running away with this? And the answer is, basically, that Trump 2024 is a really terrible candidate who should have listened to his advisers and stay focused on the economy instead of pet-eating immigrants. See also Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, Donald Trump Has Lost His Sh*t.

I understand there is some indication in some polls that late-deciding voters are more often deciding for Harris, but other polls contradict that. So, basically, nobody really knows what’s going on out there. Until we know something, I say we might as well give our nerves a little rest and be optimistic.

Tomorrow I intend to be here commenting sporadically as the returns start coming in, and you are welcome to drop by.

Just keep telling yourself that by this time next week the votes will all be counted. It shouldn’t take as long this year as it did in 2020, I keep hearing. It’s possible we’ll know the outcome by Wednesday.

So last night, it’s been reported, Trump entertained his rally crowd in Milwaukee by mimicing a lewd act with his microphone holder. I understand there are videos of this all over the web. I am not going to look for them. Tom Nichols writes at The Atlantic that Donald Trump needs help. Normally if a 77-year-old man is behaving that inappropriately, one would take him to a neurologist. And keep him out of public view. Let’s just hope he keeps his clothes on when there are cameras around.

The Associated Press is reporting that Trump intends to remain in North Carolina for the rest of the campaign. That might mean something. Or not. He probably can’t afford to lose North Carolina, which everybody says is a tossup.

The Des Moines Register reports that Iowa, which has been presumed to be a Trump state, is tipping toward Harris. A new poll shows her with a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa, driven mostly by women who are likely voters.

A long, but interesting, read, by Tim Alberta at The Atlantic — Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign. It shows Trump setting fire to his own campaign because he got bored.

Today there’s a new report of a woman needlessly dying in Texas from complications of a miscarriage. Meanwhile, Republicans have been showing us who they are, big time. They are freaking out over this ad:

When they tell you who they are, believe them:

This week, the fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge argued in a series of tweets that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”. In other words, he pits his version of the religion against the constitution, which, since the 19th amendment passed a century ago, guarantees adult citizens the right to vote regardless of sex. He argues that in marriage, the husband annexes and owns his wife’s voice and rights, so that he effectively gets two votes and she gets none. The far-right preacher is not alone in this argument that women should not have the right to participate in public life and act on their views and values.

Jesse Watters, the Fox News personality, has argued that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair”. It violates “the sanctity of our marriage; what else is she keeping from me?” Rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk also got upset about the idea that women might vote according to their agenda and not their husband’s.

The ad was produced by an organization called Vote Common Good, not the Harris-Walz campaign. Here’s another ad featuring men that has gotten less attention:

Even now I don’t think these hyperconservative man-babies understand that women are really alarmed at women dying preventable deaths because it’s more important to Republicans to stop an abortion than to save a woman’s life, even when there’s no hope the pregnancy will produce a live baby. Women more often appreciate that while most pregnancies are routine, lots can go wrong, and go wrong catastrophically. And in some heartbreaking circumstances a pregnancy has to be terminated to save the mother.

Also, the man-babies are pretty much confirming what the right-to-abortion people have been saying for years: They’re not so much interested in saving infants as in controlling women.

See also Why are so many women hiding their voting plans from their husbands by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian.

As in previous election cycles, people doing door-to-door outreach to voters are encountering men who prevent their wives from even conversing at the door or who believe their registered-Democrat wives are Republicans and women fearful of speaking or of disclosing their party and chosen candidates.

One Pennsylvania man who has been canvassing for several weeks told me: “So many times we … have knocked on doors and when both husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend have come to the door together, after hearing what we were there for so often the man stayed and the woman walked away ‘to do other things’, or the man came out to talk to us. Often the woman would come out by herself and say or whisper: ‘I’m with her and he doesn’t know it.’” Another friend reached a voter by phone, who told her that because her husband wasn’t in the car, she could admit she was voting Democratic.

Which raises the hope that there may very well be a bigger Harris vote than is showing up in the polls. Seriously, if you were to design a candidate who would disgust and repel women voters, you couldn’t do any better than Trump. His “whether the women like it or not” comment yesterday was a clear expression of Trump’s contempt for women, right down to the snear in his voice. I understand that if Harris gets even a small majority of white women, she’s probably going to be POTUS.

Another aspect of this election I haven’t gotten around to writing about is that electing Trump will probably mean handing the federal government over to a pack of billionaire tech bros. Elon Musk is one of the bros; Peter Thiel, who is J.D. Vance’s patron, is another. They have their own agenda, which has little to do with either MAGA or the good of the nation generally. Trump’s brains are fried, and his health issues are not going to go away if he’s elected. The bros will let him sit in the Oval Office as long as he’s pliable and can pose for photos in the chair, I suppose, but he won’t be running anything.

Elon Musk will want to gut safety net programs, which means I could lose my affordable and partly subsidized apartment, not to mention Medicare. Thiel’s agenda is contradictory — a mix of libertarianism and authoritarianism — but whatever it is, he’s putting a lot of money into getting Trumpy candidates elected.

He’s no tech bro, but he’s terrifying:  RFK the Lesser expects to be given control of federal agencies that oversee medical care, food, and drugs. He wants to stop all vaccinations, of course.

Four more days.

Update: Hugh Hewitt has resigned from the Washington Post. I take it he couldn’t deal with a conversation in a live event with Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus, and he threw a fit and stormed off, and isn’t coming back. (Please.) This is being reported at several places, but I can’t find any trace of it at the Washington Post. And I fully expect Bezos the Spineless to hire another MAGAzoid to replace him, to keep the MAGA to normie ratio in the editorial section at 27:1.

I voted yesterday. It was a lovely day. The Jones-Lawler House race in my district is very close, I understand. I finally found some polls that say Republican Mike Lawler is ahead by a couple of points. Republicans have been running ads that paint Mondale Jones as a wild-eyed defund-the-police radical. Democrats have run ads reminding voters that Lawler’s voting record is anti-abortion rights. So we’ll see next week what worked.

At his Sunday night Nazi Nostalgia Rally in Madison Square Garden, Trump revealed he shared a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.” Johnson, of course, refuses to talk about it.

At The Nation, Elie Mystal explains the two different ways Trump could become president again by having the election decided by the House of Representatives, which he assumes is “the secret.” The most likely plan, Mystal says, is to delay certification of votes in enough states to deny Kamala Harris 270 electoral votes. Josh Kovinsky at Talking Points Memo talked to some Trump electors in swing states who suggest they will “show up” to stall certification of the vote in their states if Trump loses. So, yes, Trump definitely has a plan and at least some people in place to carry out that plan.

I’ve read a couple of analyses recently that said it’s unlikely Trump could pull this off. I’m sure the Democrats are preparing for this. I would also like to point out that most of the infamous swing states have Democratic governors who might be able to intervene if something hinky were going on with certification. And the Republican governor of Georgia is already on record as being unwilling to break laws on Trump’s behalf.

There is a lot of speculation going on that Trump’s internal polling shows him losing, which is why he’s putting so much effort into sowing chaos after the election. But then it’s often been said of Trump that he’d rather succeed by cheating than by, you know, actually succeeding.

It’s also the case that the polls could be wrong. Josh Marshall discusses “herding,” or the tendency of polling companies to try to stay in line with what the other polling companies are reporting.

If you’re watching the latest polls, make a note of something called “herding.” It could be relevant for discussions of polling after the election. The concept is straightforward. In the final days of an election, poll results tend to trend toward consensus. One possibility is that everyone is finally making up their mind and the picture and reality is coming into focus. But that’s not the only possibility. For a mix of good faith and maybe less than good faith reasons, pollsters can become increasingly leery of publishing an outlier poll. There’s a tendency to “herd” together for extra-statistical reasons.

Let’s say you’re five days out from the election and the polling averages say candidate Jones is up 2 points and you’ve got a poll which says candidate Smith is up 3 points. (Pardon my defaulting to anglo surnames.) Everyone has an outlier result sometimes. But do you really want your final poll to be a weird outlier? In the modern era with aggregators, pollsters are often graded on the predictive accuracy of their final polls. So it kind of matters. If you’re a bit shady maybe you just tweak your numbers and get them closer to the average. If you’re more on the level maybe you take a closer look at the data and find something that really looks like it needs adjusting. Maybe you just decide that you’re going to hold this one poll back.

The weird consistensy of the polling over the past few weeks may be pointing to herding, or it may just be telling us people aren’t changing their minds. It’s also the case that a normal polling error might cause the polls to be wrong by as much as eight percentage points, and one or the other candidate could win decisively. So there’s really no point wringing our hands over the polls.

See also David Kurtz’s Morning Memo at TPM, Major News Media Fall For Fake GOP Outrage Yet Again.

Well, it’s happened again. We have the name of another woman who died because of Trump abortion bans.

She Died After a Miscarriage: Doctors said it was “inevitable” that Josseli Barnica would miscarry. Yet they waited 40 hours for the fetal heartbeat to stop. She died of an infection three days later. … Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who died after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, ProPublica found. … More than a dozen doctors who reviewed the case at ProPublica’s request said Barnica’s death was “preventable.” They called it “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

Keep in mind that the women who can be identified are no doubt not all of the women who have died. Yet the Fetus People continue to hang on to the fiction that abortion procedures are never medically necessary.  And this is not the only fiction they are pushing.

A political action committee called RBG PAC—yes, after the former Supreme Court justice—started spending $20 million Friday on a campaign claiming that Trump has been clear that he opposes a national abortion ban (he hasn’t) and that Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate state abortion laws (far from it). Yet the group’s website has the gall to show both their photos, along with the phrase “Great minds think alike.”

As I have said before about the anti-abortion zealots, without all the lies they make up they’d have no argument at all.

One of the best daily news roundups anywhere is the Morming Memo at TPM, usually written by David Kurtz. I’m just going to direct you there for the rest of today’s developments so far.

In this election, we seem to have reached a stage in which everything to be said has been said and everything to be done has been done. We’re just doing variations on the same old themes now.

The October surprise turned out to be a crude joke about Puerto Rico. There are significant Puerto Rican populations in most of the infamous swing states, and a backlash is spreading. Surprise! There is speculation the one joke alone could cost Trump Pennsylvania, at least.

Trump has reached his standard stage of denying he knows anything about the joke or the comedian.

Even so, the information bubble most MAGAts live in is telling them Trump is about to win in a landslide. They are being prepared to reject the election results if Harris wins. It will be ugly.  See also Philip Bump, The stage is set for post-election tumult if Trump loses.

In the “every accusation is a confession” department, Trump accused Harris of running a “campaign of hate.” He also warned Michelle Obama she made a “big mistake” by being “nasty” to him.

In the things to read department, I recommend this interview with Stuart Stevens at Vanity Fair. Stuart, who shows up on MSNBC from time to time, is a former GOP campaign consultant who has a lot of insightful things to say about the Republican Party and the election. And Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times says That Revolting Rally Was a Sign of Weakness. Here’s just a bit:

Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.

Consider the absence from the stage of anyone in Republican politics who isn’t a bona fide MAGA acolyte. There were no charismatic Republican lawmakers fighting tough races in swing states. There were no popular Republican governors, not even vocal allies like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin. There were no former rivals, reconciled to Trump’s leadership, like Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. And there were no figures of perceived moderation and propriety that, if they were present, could lend credence to the notion that electing Trump would bring some version of stability back to American life.

Instead, the rally showcased an off-putting combination of D-list celebrities, including Dr. Phil and a visibly worn Hulk Hogan, and Trump sycophants, perhaps most notably Elon Musk, who has sunk tens of millions of dollars into the effort to put the former president back in the White House.

Tonight Kamala Harris will be giving a major speech from the Ellipse in Washington DC. This is supposed to be her “closing argument.” It starts at 7 Eastern Time, or thereabouts.

Just a few more days …

Well, I’m back, reporting from enemy territory. The wedding I attended was in Huntsville, Alambama. However, Huntsville may not be representative of Alabama, as the main industry there literally is rocket science. There’s a major NASA facility and also a major military facility, both into creating better rockets. I understand there’s a high concentration of Ph.D.s living in Huntsville. In all my looking around I saw maybe two Trump signs, plus a couple of Harris Walz signs. No one was talking about the election. You wouldn’t know there was an election about to happen.

Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally is getting a lot of blowback. David Rothkopf
of Daily Beast says Trump committed political suicide last night. Remarks by “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe are getting the most attention, and today Hinchfliffe is saying of his critics, “These people have no sense of humor.” Of course. But it wasn’t just Hinchcliffe. David Graham writes at The Atlantic,

A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

Adam Wren wrote at Politico, “If Donald Trump loses on Nov. 5, the racist carnival he curated at Madison Square Garden could be remembered as the day that cost him this margin-of-error election.” Which does make one wonder, what were they thinking? But of course they weren’t thinking at all. The hate is their best argument for why we should vote for Trump. They don’t have anything else to offer.

Years ago I read a social-psychological study of white supremacists that said such racists sincerely believe other white people are as racist as they are but just won’t aedmit it. And that may be the assumption behind last night. They’re assuming that for every Puerto Rican vote they lose there are more closet white racists they will gain.

Davivd Kurtz, TPM:

Perhaps the best analysis came from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) who properly places the MSG rally in the context of what comes next (4:00 mark):

“This was a hate rally. This was not just a presidential rally, this was also not just a campaign rally. I think it’s important for people to understand these are mini January 6 rallies, these are mini Stop the Steal rallies. These are rallies to prime an electorate into rejecting the results of an election if it doesn’t go the way that they want.”

AOC’s assessment is backed by experts like Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who pointed specifically to rally speakers claiming an unspecified “they” tried to assassinate Trump: “The purpose of this is to conjure a threat environment sufficient to justify authoritarian action if they win. Old trick of those planning coups as well.”

The MSG rally was a harbinger of what’s to come, not just in a Trump II presidency, but as soon as election night next week. Consider yourself warned.

See also Josh Marshall, A Good Piece on Polling

We’ve discussed repeatedly in recent months how poll results aren’t just “the numbers” in some hard, incontestable sense. They include a set of assumptions about the nature of the electorate…. But this post by a professor at Vanderbilt provides a really helpful real-world illustration. Josh Clinton takes sample data and shows that by using different reasonable and good faith assumptions about the electorate he can get results ranging from Harris +.9 to Harris +8. Don’t pay attention to the fact that these results are all still in her favor. The point is that the assumptions baked into the poll can yield results 7 points apart. 

It may be that the election really isn’t as close as the polls are reporting, beccause the assumptions are wrong. But we won’t know until the votes are counted.

Update: I’m watching a video of part of the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, and the speaker was going on about how Jews are not Aryans. The joke is that the speaker wasn’t an Aryan, either. Here’s something I wrote about what we know about the actual Aryans and how Europeans somehow created the myth they were special white people.

I am on the road to attend a wedding. I was going to bring my laptop but realized at the last minute it waz too much to carry. I will be home late Sunday. I am posting this with great difficulty from my Kindle. In the meantime, consider this an open thread to discuss whatever.