2020 Thankfulness.

I’m thankful for my brother.

On January 22, I was sitting in stopped traffic at 9:30 at night, thanks to two closed lanes on a major interstate. I’d been at work trying to get grades in shape while finishing the final for the next day, and was cursing my aversion to road tolls and the shorter trip home–I do what I can to deny the government money, but I’d have been home half an hour by now if I’d paid. Suddenly the world seemed to explode. I remember Tom Petty’s “American Girl” was on the radio and thinking I’ll never hear a song in this car again because some motherfucker just killed it. (Yes, readers, my first thought during what turned out to be a four-car pileup was that my beloved 2001 Honda Accord with 300K miles on it was no more.) The motherfucker in question was a county bus driver who never bothered to brake.

Four hours later, when the tow trucks finally came to clear up the mess and I’d made it to my mother’s house (the closest to the accident), staring at the ceiling from my spot on her couch mulling a  a grim and expensive month or three. Either I cut out of school at the semester cutover, when I get new students, all to buy a car in a hurry, or I uber to work, which would be $100/day. (You might think the bus company would cut a quick check but my instincts said no, and I was right).  Yes, of course, I should have been grateful I was unharmed but I’m a pessimist. At 6 am, my couple hours sleep was woken by a text from my brother, already at work, wondering why my car hadn’t been in the driveway. I’d gotten lucky, perhaps? Alas, no, I said, and texted back a picture of my car.  He called. “Hey, my car just sits here all day. Want to borrow it?”

And so for the next two months I got up early, drove him and his bike to his store, and then to school. He rode his bike home and lost ten pounds. I got a blissful break from having to buy a car in a hurry. Even once the shutdown ended my commute, his car was mine to borrow whenever needed.

I pay most of the bills of our household outside of rent, as my salary is nearly double his, but when he had a chance to offer something of value, he didn’t hesitate. I didn’t buy a car until late July.

I’m thankful for all my family.

It was my stepfather’s mechanic who mentioned he had a 2005 Honda Civic for $4000. I said no when my stepfather called. Automatic transmission? Civic not Accord? Pish tosh. He said I should think for longer. Five minutes later I called him back and said yes. The case may never settle.  I had 4K in the bank. This was a nobrainer. Defying his daughter’s social distancing orders, my stepdad and my mom drove me to check out the Civic, which I bought on sight. It’s a good car.

I’m thankful that my sister mostly ignores the similar social strictures of her daughter, my niece, an adorable nurse who has been traumatized by her time in the covid-19 wards. I”ve defied nonsensical travel guidelines to visit twice: first in June, now for Thanksgiving.

I’m thankful my father is doing well as can be expected, given that he spent six weeks in the hospital in February and March. When he came home, he did so well that by early July, he was bored. When I called and told him that my brother and I would like to come see him and take him on a vacation but, you know, covid-19, you’re 83 with every known risk factor and even if we could get in to take a test, the waiting period would render it useless. My dad said unhesitatingly, “Screw that. Let’s go fishing.” We went on a two-week trip through Table Rock Lake and Bull Shoals. Caught nothing, although my casting improved dramatically. Epic vacation.

I’m thankful my son is a good father and husband, even if it means  I can’t go see my grandkids because his wife is, well, clearly not of the same mindset as my family, and the kids can’t leave the house because she’s afraid they’ll get covid19. He backs her play loyally. Or maybe she’s convinced him. Whatever. I’m happy he’s happy.

I’m thankful for my family’s economic good fortune.

No one in my family is suffering from these idiotic pandemic shutdowns. It’s truly a blessing that we’re all still gainfully employed. Hell, my investments are even slightly ahead.

I’m thankful for my students.

Back in September late one night, endlessly grading, I noticed Valerie hadn’t turned in anything in a week and suddenly realized I had no idea what Valerie looked like.

There’s one mirror in my house, in the bathroom. Until the shutdown, I never spent more than a second or two seeing my face, usually when brushing my teeth. Now I spend all day looking at myself in a zoom shot but can’t summon a mental image of my students–a tiny thumbnail impression, maybe, or their avatar.

I asked Valerie to office hours. She kept her camera off until I told her the missing assignments weren’t a problem, that I just needed to know how she was doing. Could she turn on the camera? She was crying. She didn’t understand anything. She was so busy with her English assignments. She kept putting my work off because she didn’t know what to do or how to catch up. She listened, she paid attention, she just didn’t get it. I told her to breathe, to not worry about catching up, and to turn in the next assignment no matter how much wasn’t done so I could see what she needed.

Valerie nodded and smiled. She turned in the next assignment. And the one after that. She’s doing well now. And I know what she looks like.

My attendance rates in all three classes are 100% most days. No chronic absences. No cuts.  All of my students get enough work done to pass, most are learning and improving. Some are thriving.

I am so thankful they come back, day after day, in a world where their lives and opportunities have been traded off in a mostly doomed effort to save the elderly.

I wish their faces were all in my memory.

I’m thankful I’m a teacher.

I’m so angry at this wasted year. My own life is splendid, as you might infer from the regular mention of vacations.  But the idiocy of politicians, the media, the “public health experts” who are doing their best to destroy the young and the poor, to obliterate small businesses by forcing them closed….enough. I’m not going to rant again. And I know they can only achieve this destruction with our permission. Far too many people are terrified of a generally mild illness, embrace the shutdowns, wear their masks in the belief they protect, blame the spread on non-compliance. I await the day those people, the compliers, the believers, realize what a waste all this is. Or the vaccine. Whatever gets life back.

Until then, I find great comfort in my job.  Like many other teachers, I work constantly to improve my lessons, to reach more students, to find ways to help them learn. How much worse would all this be if I were forced to watch the effect of these hated shutdowns, do nothing? If nothing else, I can focus my energy on making education something enjoyable and productive for my ninety or so students. I’m grateful for that privilege.

I’m thankful you’re reading.

Hope your Thanksgiving was as good as mine.

2020 Election: Not Yesterday’s Enterprise

(note: I began this before others made similar points, but decided to clear the cache. I like the two analogies.)

Ever hear of Paul Wylie?

Like most Americans, I only ever watch winter sports during the Winter Olympics, and only then when Americans have a shot at a medal. Which means watching figure skating, mostly.  American men have only won 15 of 75 Olympic figure skating medals, and they were concentrated during two periods. 40% of that haul came from 1948-56 (the Buttons era). Since 1984, just five American men have won medals, 60% of them gold, and 60% from 1984-1992. One last 60% number–that’s how many of the five are straight. Yes, a majority of the US male figure skaters who won Olympic medals the past 40 years are straight. 100% of the British male figure skater medallists are gay (that’s a grand total of 2). But I digress. What was my point? Oh, yes, Wylie.

Paul Wylie’s Alberville medal is one of the greatest Olympic stories in any sport. Long considered a highly talented skater with a life outside skating, Wylie spent over a decade in the top tier of US skaters and five years in the top 3, but he was famous for folding under pressure and never placed higher than ninth in international competition. After graduating from Harvard, he decided to give the nationals one more try, narrowly qualifying for the Olympic team in 92 by a tenth of a point, despite skating quite poorly. The US team coaches regretted his placement, wishing they could give younger fourth place finisher Mark Mitchell some international experience. Wylie had already been dumped from the Worlds, a few weeks after the Olympics, in favor of Mitchell.  Todd Eldredge and Christopher Bowman, the other two Americans, had both been US national champions,  and the heavy gold medal favorites were Canadian and Russian.

But in Alberville, all the favorites fell. Kurt Browning, the greatest skater never to medal at the Olympics, Bowman the Showman, Todd Eldredge, Victor Petrenko, they all had catastrophic errors during their short programs. Everyone except Wylie. For the first time in his skating career, he nailed the short program during a competition. Then in the free skate, with a shot at bronze, his nerves didn’t fail him and he skated the only clean program of the final night. Most people who watched felt he should have gotten the gold, but Olympic judges, always iffy, were apparently determined to give Petrenko Russia’s first gold medal in figure skating. And so Wylie became the oldest figure skating medalist in 60 years by taking silver.

It didn’t matter. Not to Wylie, who would have been ecstatic with a bronze. Not to the people who watched his performance, who knew he’d won in any fair comparison. Not to Scott Hamilton, the 1984 gold medal winner who was mocked for plugging Wylie’s chances after the short. Certainly not to me; the Wylie medal is in my top five great Olympic moments (second only to the 1984 4×200 men’s relay when Bruce Hayes held off the Albatross.)

Donald Trump is not Paul Wylie. But I like this little history for more than its proof that I value second place finishes as extraordinary achievements, often superior to the winner’s. Paul Wylie reminds me that for better or worse, expert opinion has no impact on outcomes. All of us, given the right circumstances, can ignore the naysayers, execute, and achieve far beyond what anyone predicted. So trust me when I say that short of a Trump win, I’m not just pleased with his finish. I’m ecstatic.

At right is just a sample of the conventional wisdom served up by pundits who hadn’t learned a thing in 4 years.

He wasn’t expanding his base. His approval numbers were horrible (based on polls, of course). He wasn’t president to all the people. He was focusing on the hard right “extremist” wing of his voters.

And they were wrong.

Trump grew his voter support in absolute numbers by 16%. This increase registered in every demographic except white males, if we are to trust exit polls. Dramatically. He got the highest percentage of non-white voters of any Republican candidate since 1960.

Understand, of course, he did this with less money. With active media hostility and lies. With a conservative intellectual class at best halfheartedly behind him. With some conservative media outlets and of course, the Never Trump movement, actively agitating against him. With the polls showing him losing  by historic margins in every battleground state.

Trump ignored that and played his game. He did it on his own, with only one real assist: the massive GOP registration effort.

It’s customary to call Trump vain and weak. A weaker guy would have folded. He would have given off flop sweat. Loser fumes. The media mocked him endlessly. Poll analyst Nate Silver, who angrily told people after the election to fuck off if they thought the polls were bad, called the Trafalgar results “crazy” beforehand. David Wasserman nattered about how the private district results showed a wipeout.

The media did everything it could to depress Trump turnout by telling the world it was all over. Biden by a wipeout.

Result: Trump got more votes than any Republican or Democratic candidate ever.

Except–alas–Joe Biden.

We can trust counted votes. Maybe. Here’s the growth in Trump vote, by state. Purple bars are battleground states.

I wrote once about the invisible Trump voters, the blue state voters The west coast ones came out in force. California is still counting votes and Trump is still up nearly 33%. Washington’s nearly at 30%. Oregon and New Mexico increased by over 20%. Fifty percent more Hawaiians voted for Trump. The east coast blue states are still counting absentee ballots, but all gave Trump between 10 and 20%  more votes.

As I’ve tweeted hundreds of times, in 2016 California gave Trump more than any state but Florida and Texas. I’ll have to update that: in 2020, California gave Trump more votes than any other state, full stop. Sum up the votes in the 15 least populated states Trump won, and they’re just barely ahead of California. Who knows, the state might even catch up when they find that last vote coming in on the mail boat from Kathmandu.

In the battleground states, his vote count increased an average of 16%, with a high of 33% growth….in Arizona. With Nevada just behind at 30%.

As the jubilant press corps reminds us daily, Trump’s going to be one of just four single-term presidents since 1900. But take a look at his re-election numbers compared to other presidents since Eisenhower.

Nixon’s huge numbers were because of George Wallace’s relatively successful third party run in 1968. And hey, Clinton is the only Democrat president who got more votes in his second run.

I found only one president who improved on his re-election numbers yet lost the election: Grover Cleveland.

We’ll have to wait four years to see if Trump has has anything more in common with Cleveland than increased votes and a much younger wife.

Great stuff. But.

Biden improved on Hillary’s numbers by far more in the battleground states, with an average increase of 24% and a high of 44% growth….in Arizona. So he won.

“It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. “–Andrew Sullivan…and a host of other anti-Trump, anti-woke folks saying the equivalent of “the voters removed Trump with admirable surgical precision”.

No. Not with these numbers. This was a blow out election on both sides. There’s nothing surgical or precise about 2020. Biden held on in the right states in much the way this Joplin hospital held on in the tornado:

A shift in 100K votes and Trump wins. Of course Biden got more votes. I wonder if that will be true from here on in, regardless of the winner. Something we once viewed as an anomaly will become the norm. But in the right places, Trump almost matched Biden’s growth.

Almost.

I wish just a few more Trump voters had gotten out there. Or I wish the absentee ballot fraud were less. Take your pick. I am neutral lean fraud on that issue.

I actually know relatives and friends who flatly disbelieve millions more voters came out for Biden. I was a bit shocked. I’m supposed to be the cynical one, but I totally expected a blue wave. I was just delighted there was a matching red one.

Still, do I think it’s possible there was a coordinated Dem effort to manufacture millions of absentee ballots? Sure. The most likely rationale they’d use for the fraud was conviction that Biden had this locked up, but a massive blowout that totally repudiated Trump would be so much better, right? Wipe out the GOP fear of Trump voters, make them see the light and bend over to more immigration, more transgender nonsense, more government health care, blah blah blah. So why not create more votes? It’s not like we’re changing the election, or anything. Biden’s going to win.

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I think voter registration fraud is a much bigger issue than voter fraud, and much easier to work out ahead of time. The Dems’ concerted push to increase mail-in voting, lower the standards for counting, and fight for extended delivery is all in keeping with this. But hey, it’s not like they were changing the results, or anything. Biden’s going to win, right? The polls all say so. This is just beating down Trump voters, making them look fringe.

And then the stunner: Trump voters come out en masse, and Biden might lose. Stop the counting! And then got to the cities, where Trump did pretty well, and ask them to manufacture just enough votes. City machines are totally up with that sort of thing.

Do I think this happened? Eh. I don’t know. I’m just as willing to believe it was authentically that close, with the usual marginal fraud in cities.

I do know that Megan McArdle and any other media figure who castigates reasonable skepticism “immoral” can whistle disapproval in swing time for all I care. Swim in outrage until they’re pruny. Dunk their faces in smarmy self-righteousness while eating shit. I don’t care.

Because here’s what I’m absolutely certain of: if any “journalist” learned of an effort to rig the election for Biden, he or she would not expose such efforts but instead ask, “How can I help?”

And that’s why so many Trump voters are convinced there’s fraud. Fuck you all, media folk. You are the ones who have discredited America. You aren’t speaking for America. You’re entertainers, shucking and jiving for the people who pay. Once again, you got your hats handed to you with the enormity of Trump’s vote count. Biden win or not.

I wish Trump had less slimy advocates, but then I always wish that. Because of Trump, other GOP pols will see the advantage in being and getting better advocates.

Back in the early days of Trump’s presidency, I wrote:

The first Star Trek “reboot”  took the bold act of altering the past in a famous fictional timeline. The new movies have the freedom to reinvent, while we watch the movies, fully aware what “really” happened. This got taken to extremes for “Into the Darkness”, when the last half hour echoed word for word the greatest Star Trek movie ever made with a character swap, but it’s still pretty clever.

Ever since Trump won in November, I’ve felt like we’re all living through an alternate timeline. Like Tom Hanks’ “Doug” said in that sublime Black Jeopardy skit, “Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens”. Everyone of any importance knew Hillary would win.  Jobs were accepted. Plans were made.

But while I see it as a reboot, an opportunity to rewrite the future, all the people with any voice or influence think of the election as Yesterday’s Enterprise. Just as the Enterprise C slipped through the temporal rift and forestalled the truce between the Klingons and the Federation, so too did a whole bunch of voters escape the notice of the Deep State.

…….

The media wants to change the world back to way it was.  What’s happening now is all wrong, they’re not supposed to be here, they have to  fix it.  If they can just keep the pressure on and play for time, someone who “wasn’t supposed to be here” will drag the wounded Enterprise C back a hundred years to be destroyed.  The timeline can be restored.

Sure, I’d have rather Trump won. But  Trump ended his presidency with numbers that force the GOP to accept the reboot. There’s no shoving the voters and Trump into the rift to fix the timeline. Republicans have been worried about their “demographic destiny” for years. Trump’s showed them a way forward. (Something I predicted more than once, incidentally.)

History will, I think, be kinder to Trump than the current moment, but I wonder if they will understand his greatest achievement.

Trump faced down media and elite howls of disapproval and outrage. He didn’t apologize. He ruthlessly attacked anyone who insulted him for his views. By refusing to back down, he  showed all Americans how much the media, intellectual class, and even our political parties were throttling American policy by narrowly defining boundaries of acceptable opinions and proposals to their own political demands. He restored balance to American discourse almost singlehandedly. In doing so, Trump gave all Americans a real choice.

I was grateful back in 2016. I’m grateful now.

2020 Election: Political What Ifs and Other Gasbaggery

First, thanks to Kyle Smith for writing part I of my planned article.

If the polls are right, Biden wins. All the endless nattering about “Trump’s window closing“…no, wait, that’s from 2016, this month the meme is “Trump’s running out of time”, is so much idiocy. The polls are either right and Biden wins in a landslide, or they’re wrong in Trump’s favor and he’s got a shot. The point is, he’s got a shot if the polls are wrong, not if he takes whatever sage wisdom various conservative pundits dish out about constructing a good closing story.

Political analysts are always retrofitting their reality post-hoc. The night that Trump won, I remember Steve Kornacki and Bill Hemmer talking about the staggering numbers they were seeing out of rural towns and counties in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. They had just never anticipated that kind of outpouring and it clearly helped Trump win. But after the fact, no one ever mentions this; instead, “Trump won over the most disliked candidate in Democratic history” (who somehow, despite being epic-ally unpopular, got more votes).

So. If the polls are correct, it’s a blowout. If the polls are right, Biden will win Arizona and Georgia, to say nothing of the original Blue Wall states. He might pull out Texas. If the polls are right, Joe Biden will win a higher percentage of the white vote than any Dem candidate since Jimmy Carter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really?

 

So this next part isn’t for Dems. You Dems do what you do, I grok that. This part is for anyone who was even thinking of voting for Trump or who voted for Trump in 2016, the people who are responsible for the plummeting support for Black Lives Matter looting, the people who get utterly squicked out by feeding 8 year olds hormones to change their gender whether or not the parents approve. The people who support fracking and affordable gas prices and think trying to fix climate change is not worth destroying our country. The people who don’t want the virtual open borders and fake asylum claims and amnesty, much less refugees dumped on states without consent, who loathe antifa, who can’t believe that colleges are ending admissions tests.  The people who don’t want to spend young lives fighting pointless, endless wars in the middle east, who think the 1619 Project is bullshit, who are privately appalled at the media open hostility to Republicans. The people who think unisex bathrooms are a horrible idea, who don’t want the courts stacked, don’t want statehood for Puerto Rico, DC, and Guam. The people who are terrified that cancel culture has gone too far, that free speech is disappearing in America.

But are voting for Biden anyway.

If the polls are correct, and “Trump lost the suburbs” and suburban women in particular, who supported Trump last time, then they are all looking at the city riots and antifa street-blocking and Democrats defunding police and Biden always avoiding answering straight up that he won’t support this until a desperate media pushes him to say something and saying yeah, that’s my guy.

 

 

 

 

 

Really?

 

 

You’re….tired of Trump? It’s just always so much….struggle? You find him embarrassing? You think someone else would handle covid19 better? You just don’t like him? You want someone the French and English will respect?

 

Jaysus. The question is, of course, how many of you are out there. To all those potential Trump voters who just got tired of the chaos and plan to or have voted Biden:  you’re kidding yourself. And if you are so numerous that the polls are correct, you’re going to regret what comes. Worse than the lukewarm Obama voters of 2008 and 2012 regretted it when they patted themselves on voting for the first black President and then  realized holy crap, he’s a leftist and sent the Dems scooting, two midterms in a row. Except this will be worse because the Democrat left is ascendant and the pressure on moderates to go along or be cancelled is already unbearable. Let’s hope you have the opportunity to reverse yourself and undo the damage.

A few Ricochet podcasts ago, Rob Long blew up at James Lileks and Peter Robinson for doing what I just did, in chastising people for switching to Biden. It’s Trump’s fault, he said. Politics is persuasion. Trump doesn’t persuade. He doesn’t understand what it’s about. First, I understand the point. I just cry bullshit. Voters have their own responsibilities. Anyone who holds even some of the views I outline above and votes for Biden will get it, good and hard, and screw them for dragging the rest of us down with them. Again, Dems: not you. You do what you do.

So that’s for if the polls are right. Which, again, they might be.

The polls didn’t move. Not through the insane BLM riots, the mad, uncontrolled cities. The crazy violence and highway blockings. That’s when I began to wonder. In 2016, I accepted the polls.  I saw what Trump was trying to do and hoped like hell the state polls were wrong, but until election night it was a pipe dream. This year, I am really forcing myself to accept the state polls, but my basic stance is doubt.  The national polls I think are realistic. But anyone who thinks an even 10% national lead spells a definite Biden rout is delusional. I’ve been pointing out for four years that every Republican in California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Jersey could stay home and make no difference at all to the electoral outcome while creating a popular vote massacre.

Understand, even though every logical bone in my body doubts those polls, I try really hard to believe them and emotionally, I am totally prepared for a Biden blowout.

Is it possible that all this organic support for Trump, the car caravans and boat parades could represent a huge percentage of Trump voters, rather than the tip of the iceberg? Is it possible that untold gazillions of people who never make a political remark show up and vote Biden, crushing the louder opposition?

Oh, hell to the yeah.

But here’s the thing: that’s what everyone thought last time. That’s what keeps on running through my mind, all the parallels. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see me do the “Four Year Check” every time some media pundit makes a triumphalist comment: Bill Kristol cackling in glee, Republicans cutting Trump loose, white women hate Trump, Amy Walters confidently predicting a Trump loss, shock that Trump is only 5-7 points up in Kansas, Biden/Clinton lead insurmountable, Megan McArdle mocking the poll unskewers, Dave Wasserman talking of Trump’s utter meltdown, and there’s thousands more. It all feels exactly the same.

But it’s different, they assure me.

 

OK.

 

Here’s what reassures me: win or lose, Trump goes out fighting. It’s widely reported that he didn’t expect to win in 2016. You never saw him say so. The media not only loathes Trump but actively works as campaign hacks for Biden, but there are no Trump equivalent stories to the Bush family reunion in the 2016 South Carolina primary or the desperation in the last weeks of the McCain campaign. Trump didn’t spend the last weeks of October sitting around the fire reading Hemingway short stories, and not only because he’d probably have trouble identifying one. The media may hate him, but they’re scared he might win, and you’ll never know otherwise from Trump. The man doesn’t do flop sweat.

Similarly, I have no fear that all the idiotic pollster prattle will dissuade GOP voters. I worry maybe the weather will do a terrible thing, but have no fears that Bud and Mary will say “Jeeze, Nate Silver says Donald Trump only has a 10% chance to win and Dave Wasserman says he’s almost seen enough, so let’s order pizza and do some premature mourning.” No, if Trump loses it’s because not enough people in the right states want him to be President, not because any supporter didn’t bother to show up.  His supporters will come out, from the homeliest hamlet to the many usually invisible Trump voters in blue states (they’ve been having some fun with their rallies this time round). And that’s comforting. The media might be trying to use certainty to depress the Trump vote. They’ll fail.

I have disliked the media and “experts” generally since 2008, but at this point I just hate them all. Boundless contempt, I have. What comforts me is that I’m not alone. The media can still cancel. The media still has influence with corporations, with employers, public and private. But they have no influence over public opinion.  The middlebrows who look to elites exist, but only on the Dem side, and it’s a vanishingly small group. The rest of us think the media are hacks or honest activists, with the only question being whose side they’re shilling for. If Trump doesn’t win, it won’t be because of a single thing the media wrote or didn’t write.

Which brings up another point I’ve been mulling for a while: GOP voters need new media. The National Review couldn’t even bring itself to endorse Trump, and published another vile diatribe by Kevin Williamson, who loathes America so much he’s moving to Switzerland, which he finds much more civilized.  If I want to read articles overflowing with disdain for the white working class, I’d read Twitter bluechecks.  The editors couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump and gave a voice to one formal yes, one formal no, and one formal who knows–but that’s in addition to Kevin Williamson, Richard Brookhiser, and Jay Nordlinger all saying they wouldn’t vote for him.

The Federalist has generally gone pro-Trump. Washington Examiner, with the single best reporter on the conservative beat, nonetheless has Tim Carney bragging he won’t vote and begging people not to hate people just because they voted for Trump.

Never mind The Dispatch and The Bulwark and the other Never Trump folks just slavering to throw out those plebe Trump supporters. I listen to lot of podcasts, most of them by conservative media folks, and they spend their time bitching about Trump, endlessly. Then occasionally they’ll bitch about Biden and the media and the left, but does that make them say Trump’s better? Oh, hell no. Back to bitching about Trump.

Guys, he won without your help once. If he wins without your help twice, who needs you? And if he doesn’t win, and you didn’t fight for him–again, who needs you?

But the sad truth is that we Trump voters still read National Review, still read Jonah Goldberg’s GFile, still talk about Ross Douthat, still call Bill Kristol a conservative and still support their various efforts to some degree because who else is there? They treat Trump voters like crap because they can.

OK, end bitching about media.

What if it’s not a Biden blowout? What if the polls are wrong, at least in part?

Well, then, we have a narrow Biden win or a narrow Trump win.

Narrow Biden win:

1. Trump keeps Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia. Biden takes the blue wall states.
2. Trump keeps Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina. Biden takes the rest of the blue wall and….Georgia.

Narrow Trump win:

1. Trump keeps Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina. Biden takes the rest of the blue wall and…Arizona.
2. Trump loses Georgia but picks up Michigan in addition to the rest.

(as you can see, I have no truck with those single elector places. Assume they go to Biden.)

I naturally want Trump to win, but a narrow Biden victory will give serious pause to the plans to rework the GOP, particularly if Trump gets record numbers of blacks and Hispanics. Jim Geraghty hopes that a Trump loss will convince the GOP to be less “Trumpy”, but a GOP that loses white suburbs while gaining with blacks and Hispanics is a GOP in a lot better shape than the free trade, no entitlements anti-affirmative action party that Geraghty dreams about, when he isn’t having covid19 nightmares.

And as bad as a Biden presidency would be, a narrow win would set the media back on its heels, particularly if it was accompanied by an increased black and Hispanic vote.

If Trump wins, well, it’s a great day.

One last election thought, on the Senate: if the Dems tie  the Senate–or even if they don’t–Mitch McConnell should have a heart to heart with Joe Manchin and Jon Tester. Both of them will face endless attacks by their own party if they don’t go woke. And neither of them is woke. Both probably want to be re-elected, which will be increasingly difficult if the Democrats win the Senate. McConnell could probably promise them various committee chairs, right?

Everyone remembers that Jim Jeffords switched parties. But fewer people remember that Richard Shelby, senior senator from Alabama, did it back in 1994. He’s still around.

And maybe that will give ideas to moderate Dem representatives, too.

Worth a shot, anyway. Let’s start that realignment early!

If you haven’t made up your mind: vote Trump.