Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[johnu]

The big question a day before the election - did Mexico pay?

You must have missed the memo. China is going to pay for the wall, Mexico is going to pay for the tariffs. America is going to pay if the Manchurian President is reelected.

[kenberg]

The big question a day before the election - did Mexico pay?

 

I have been thinking that the big question is "Should I go in and vote today/" I have voted already, but I could explain to them that our president told me that I should also vote on election day just in case something happens to my paper ballot.

 

When I was 5 or so I used to have nightmares. They were nothing compared to my waking hours of the last four years. Please let this end.

[Zelandakh]

I have been thinking that the big question is "Should I go in and vote today/" I have voted already, but I could explain to them that our president told me that I should also vote on election day just in case something happens to my paper ballot.

 

When I was 5 or so I used to have nightmares. They were nothing compared to my waking hours of the last four years. Please let this end.

As a white guy Ken, surely the question for you is whether you are standing by. When you go and cast your second ballot, be sure to take your gun with you in case he also needs you to go and shoot some blacks "in self defence". No doubt you would be a "true patriot" and a "fine person" if you were able to kill a few Biden voters and simultaneously shut down the polling booth for a few hours.

[y66]

It’s possible that all of this will have a happy ending.

 

Maybe the polls are right, and Joe Biden is on course for a dominant 7 or 8 point win over Donald Trump. He could pick up a couple of decisive swing states that are supposed to finish counting votes on Tuesday night—North Carolina and Arizona, for instance—and short-circuit the president’s plan to first claim victory, then sue his way to a second term. There’s a chance that Democrats will eke out a Senate majority, too, so that they can actually govern come January, and deal properly with the deadly plague that’s reshaped our lives and crippled the economy. Perhaps there won’t be any violence at voting places, and people will be able to cast their ballots without getting hurt. Knock on wood.

 

But even if this election does bring an orderly end to the Trump era, do not for a second forget that absolutely everything about it, and the year that has led us to this point, has been utterly, incalculably insane, a 50-car pileup of reminders that we are a broken society with a broken political system that seems ever-more untenable, whether or not we are doomed to spend four more years with our addled president.

 

It is insane, for starters, that he even has a shot of pulling this race out. Nobody, least of all Trump, believes that he will win the popular vote. It is not even a discussion at this point. But we’re all trapped in a mad house erected upon the Electoral College, an anti-majoritarian barbarism that, according to conventional wisdom, now requires Democrats to win by at least 3 percent to have a shot at the White House and drives otherwise sensible Americans to spend sleepless nights and precious emotional energy freaking out over early voting patterns in Miami-Dade.

 

Other countries—the ones we like to think of as our peers, even if they see us more like a tragic, strung-out uncle these days—don’t do this to themselves. In normal, advanced presidential democracies, the candidate who gets the most votes actually wins. We’re the only one where the person who comes in second can still somehow end up in charge. There is no good argument for it, in this year of our collective misery 2020. It is nuts.

 

It is also pure lunacy that after four years of family separations, tax cuts for the rich, transparent corruption, and deadly ineptitude, more than 4 in 10 Americans are apparently ready for another round of Trump. We are literally living through one of the worst-case scenarios experts anticipated when he was first elected: A pandemic that has killed 231,000 Americans, thanks in no small part to the White House’s botched response, and is set to ravage the country for months more, since Republican leaders seem to have mostly decided to let COVID rip and hope for the best. This a man who caught a deadly pathogen because he wanted to look tough and felt silly wearing a mask, turned a White House Rose Garden party into a superspreader event, and ended up dragging the country through a week of steroid-fueled psychodrama as doctors blasted him with experimental treatments to save his life, then somehow concluded that, hey, the disease wasn’t so bad after all. Since then, he’s moved on to talking openly about firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trusted disease expert in America, after the election as payback for criticizing the administration’s response.

 

And yet a substantial portion of the country looks upon Trump, and his record, and sees not only a successful leader, but one they love, a figure they are willing to pack into a cold airplane hanger to cheer on while unmasked, because they apparently want to own the libs and the germ theory of disease. As a polity, we are not well.

 

I mean, look: If the only thing you care about is stacking the federal judiciary with conservatives, Trump has been a stellar chief executive. I get it. He just scored a hat trick on the Supreme Court. But the fact that a sizable chunk of voters, not to mention Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sees this as the single most important goal in politics is, itself, a symptom of our country’s institutional sickness; in a functioning political framework, picking judges just would not be that high stakes of an endeavor. It would be more like nominating members of the Federal Reserve—important, but not something to wage a cold civil war over. Here in the U.S.A., however, we appoint clerics for life who have final say on what laws are permitted by our two-century-old founding scripture. Much of our governance has been warped around that process of bestowing absurd, anti-democratic power.

 

Which unfortunately brings us to the question of whether we’ll have a free and fair election, even by our own low standards. I do not know if Trump planned his scheme to suppress Democratic votes ahead of time, or if he just sort of winged his way into it. But, one way or another, the president’s ravings have gradually evolved into a coherent effort by the whole conservative movement to snatch the presidency through the courts that they have jammed full of sympathetic judges. First, Trump spent years barking about voter fraud and warning specifically that Democrats would use voting by mail to steal elections. His supporters listened, and as a result, many more Democrats than Republicans have mailed their ballots in key swing states such as Pennsylvania. And now, Trump has signaled that he will do everything in his power to keep later-arriving mail-in votes from being counted, and insisted that states should announce their results by the end of Nov. 3. “We’re going to go in night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” he warned Sunday. This is not an idle threat. As the New York Times reports, “voting rights organizations and conservative groups are raising money and dispatching armies of lawyers for what could become a state-by-state, county-by-county legal battle over which ballots will ultimately be counted.” We are talking about the voter suppression equivalent of trench warfare.

 

And the Supreme Court’s conservatives appear happy to serve as soldiers in the battle, at least if the election looks close. They have spent the past weeks advancing exotic legal theories that would allow them to overrule state election officials and disqualify ballots if they saw fit; in a particularly embarrassing opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh even parroted Trump’s talking points about how it would be suspicious if states “flipped” from red to blue after election night.

 

It’s entirely possible that all of this angling won’t amount to anything; Biden could win so overwhelmingly that a few votes around the margins in the Rust Belt simply won’t matter much. But if the polls are off by a couple of points in the Sun Belt, and the election really does come down to a showdown in Pennsylvania, there’s a nonzero chance we’d be staring at Bush v. Gore Redux, which is fundamentally deranged. And even if it doesn’t, the entire Republican Party has made clear, at this point, that it is dedicated to preserving minority rule if remotely possible, that “we’re a republic, not a democracy” is its smirking, bedrock philosophy.

 

And what if Biden does win? Democrats will still need to take the Senate in order to have any hope of governing effectively, which at this point is not remotely a sure bet. Without it, Biden’s presidency could easily be smothered in its cradle, as we enter a new period of political gridlock against the backdrop of a public health and economic disaster. It’s unlikely that McConnell will approve a single judicial nomination by Biden; Republicans might greenlight his Cabinet picks, to be polite, but there’s a strong chance they will try to clip a Biden administration’s wings by holding up key regulatory nominations. Perhaps the new president could try to govern like Trump, by signing executive actions and stuffing the administration’s ranks with acting officials, but something tells me the Supreme Court might not look kindly on that sort of creativity from a Democratic White House.

 

Do we even have to talk about the ambient threat of violence around this election? To be honest, I’d prefer not to, because it’s hard not to sound like a loon going on about militias or Proud Boys or whether Trump would actually use a disturbance at polling places to send in the feds. It’s not encouraging that, so far, he and other Republicans are egging on some straightforward hooliganism, like that caravan that swarmed a Biden-Harris bus on the highway. (The president called them “patriots.” Sen. Marco Rubio said, “We love what they did.”) Hopefully, confrontations don’t rise to anything beyond that.

 

Again, maybe we dodge all of these bullets. Maybe Biden will pull off a resounding win, and even if Trump refuses to concede, the world will move on, and his refusal to promise a peaceful transition of power will just be remembered as one more inexplicably petulant provocation by a president who refused to make even token gestures toward normalcy. But the mere fact that we have to worry about the arraigned forces of minority rule returning a president this unfit and unpopular back to the Oval Office, or that his successor won’t be able to actually run the country, should make us deeply fearful for the future. If you’ve spent the past week wracked with anxiety over this election, don’t let yourself ever forget it if Biden wins. This is an insane way to run a nation.

 

The system is falling apart by itself. We’re just here to give it a little push. -- Abbie Hoffman (1968)

Okay. Enough with the pushing.

[Trinidad]

When I was 5 or so I used to have nightmares. They were nothing compared to my waking hours of the last four years. Please let this end.

The whole world has had nightmares. America picked a guy that can formulate only one sentence correctly and gave him the key to the nuclear missiles. No big deal, you would think, but this one sentence happens to be: "You're fired!".

 

I wish you a good night sleep... and many more to come.

 

Rik

[thepossum]

How's it going over there. Much Bridge going to be played for the next few hours. I can still bet on the outcome. Is $2.88 worth it at this late stage

 

Have a good night everyone

[shyams]

How's it going over there. Much Bridge going to be played for the next few hours. I can still bet on the outcome. Is $2.88 worth it at this late stage

 

I too found the betting prices quoted at present to be surprising. Everyone is expecting this to be a victory for Biden. The 538 statistical site says 90% odds that Biden will prevail; yet the betting odds imply a probability of 65% - 70%.

 

There sure is a huge profit opportunity if one trusts all the charts & statistical models.

 

Edit: I'm diving in. The odds are too rich to let this opportunity go waste.

Edited November 3, 2020 by shyams

[Zelandakh]

I think it is a hangover from the 2016 polling error. I think the last real chance for dodgy D was bad weather today causing in-person Dem voters to stay at home. It is incredibly unlikely that there will be another polling error even larger than 4 years ago given the upgrades that have been done in the sampling universe. If Biden does not win I will be extremely surprised; the Senate on the other hand could well end up being on a knife-edge.

[johnu]

I think it is a hangover from the 2016 polling error. I think the last real chance for dodgy D was bad weather today causing in-person Dem voters to stay at home.

Actually, pollsters have predicted that election day voting will favor Republicans who bought in to the Manchurian President railing against voting by mail. Democrats far outnumbered Republicans in mail in ballots and early voting. It was expected that last day voters would be Republican by a wide margin. So bad weather and natural disasters would have favored Democrats in this election.

[Zelandakh]

Actually, pollsters have predicted that election day voting will favor Republicans who bought in to the Manchurian President railing against voting by mail. Democrats far outnumbered Republicans in mail in ballots and early voting. It was expected that last day voters would be Republican by a wide margin. So bad weather and natural disasters would have favored Democrats in this election.

Republican voters also consistently score higher in terms of voter enthusiasm measures, so it is quite possible for adverse weather to impact the Democratic vote more than Republicans, particularly if it were centred on an urban centre like Miami. The simple truth is that if all Democrats come out and vote then Biden will win so only voter suppression in some form (political, legal or natural) is going to tip it back against him. Good weather is just one more potential hurdle overcome on the road to eventual success.

[cherdano]

And this, my friend Mr. Ken Berg, is why you don't use arrival date as the effective cut-off for mail-in ballots:

USPS disregards court order to conduct ballot sweeps in 12 postal districts after more than 300,000 ballots cannot be traced

 

A random USPS worker should not have the chance to influence the election result by taking work a bit slowly on election day.

[Zelandakh]

A random USPS worker should not have the chance to influence the election result by taking work a bit slowly on election day.

It is worse than this. A presidential appointee should not be in a position to decide on which counties' ballots get delivered on time and which get left on the sorting room floor. This could very easily lead to a blue legal challenge down the line in competitive states that have a "free and fair" clause in their constitutions, perhaps not for the POTUS election but certainly for some Senate races.

[barmar]

And this, my friend Mr. Ken Berg, is why you don't use arrival date as the effective cut-off for mail-in ballots:

USPS disregards court order to conduct ballot sweeps in 12 postal districts after more than 300,000 ballots cannot be traced

 

A random USPS worker should not have the chance to influence the election result by taking work a bit slowly on election day.

This is why I sent my ballot in 2 weeks ago, and then confirmed on the state web site that it had been received.

 

It's incredible that there were so many people who were still undecided at the time their states started accepting mail-in ballots. You either love Trump because you believe his bullshit, or hate him because of all his obvious faults, but it's hard to imagine a significant number of people on the fence. I guess there are lots of Republicans who dislike Trump but aren't sure they're willing to go all the way to voting for a Democrat, so they've been mulling this decision until the last minute.

[shyams]

This is why I sent my ballot in 2 weeks ago, and then confirmed on the state web site that it had been received.

 

Received does not mean it definitely will be counted. I'm sorry to sound so sceptical but I am rapidly losing faith in the so-called democracy practised in the USA.

 

I don't live in the US and obviously I have no say the outcome of your elections. While I would prefer Trump to be voted out (because he is a terrible leader), I don't mind whichever candidate wins so long as the meaning of the word "wins" is aligned to what we (the rest of the world) call winning.

[shyams]

I too found the betting prices quoted at present to be surprising. Everyone is expecting this to be a victory for Biden. The 538 statistical site says 90% odds that Biden will prevail; yet the betting odds imply a probability of 65% - 70%.

 

There sure is a huge profit opportunity if one trusts all the charts & statistical models.

 

Edit: I'm diving in. The odds are too rich to let this opportunity go waste.

 

At 00:40 GMT (7:40pm EST), the betting odds worsened for Biden by almost 10pts. His price now is at an implied winning odds of 57%. If I bet £100 on Biden at this price, I will win £70 (in addition to getting back my £100 stake).

[cherdano]

This is why I sent my ballot in 2 weeks ago, and then confirmed on the state web site that it had been received.

 

It's incredible that there were so many people who were still undecided at the time their states started accepting mail-in ballots. You either love Trump because you believe his bullshit, or hate him because of all his obvious faults, but it's hard to imagine a significant number of people on the fence. I guess there are lots of Republicans who dislike Trump but aren't sure they're willing to go all the way to voting for a Democrat, so they've been mulling this decision until the last minute.

You know, in Europe, when we hold an election, we try to count all the votes. I guess you guys in the US have other priorities.

[Zelandakh]

You know, in Europe, when we hold an election, we try to count all the votes. I guess you guys in the US have other priorities.

In fairness we also try not to have one of the candidates be in charge of running the election or of having one party decide the constitution boundaries, so it is not like they are not consistent in their priorities. Besides, most of the efforts go into stopping hostile demographics from voting at all; it is only when desperation sets in that they just don't bother counting those votes that do make it past the suppression tactics.

[Chas_P]

I will not gloat if "my guy" wins.

I will not protest if "your guy" wins.

I will not say, "He's not my president" We are all Americans.

I will not love you any less because we don't always agree.

Life will go on.

We will survive.

[shyams]

I will not gloat if "my guy" wins.

I will not protest if "your guy" wins.

I will not say, "He's not my president" We are all Americans.

I will not love you any less because we don't always agree.

Life will go on.

We will survive.

 

Call me uncharitable, but this reads somewhat like a post with the first line hidden.

The hidden line reads "Now that I know 'my guy' is winning..."

[Zelandakh]

Call me uncharitable, but this reads somewhat like a post with the first line hidden.

The hidden line reads "Now that I know 'my guy' is winning..."

Look at the numbers coming out of Ohio and North Carolina. Biden may be down with non-Mexican latinos but he is up with almost everyone else, which may mean a sweep in the mid-West. What enquiring minds really want to know is whether our resident Racist-in-Chief will start acting like a proper human being again. Sadly I suspect it is way too late to convince any BBF regulars that he is not a deplorable. Genuine conservatives are welcome but racists? sorry, he is just the sh!t on my shoe now.

[Chas_P]

sorry, he is just the sh!t on my shoe now.

As I said, I don't love you any less because we don't always agree. I wish you happiness.

[shyams]

At 00:40 GMT (7:40pm EST), the betting odds worsened for Biden by almost 10pts. His price now is at an implied winning odds of 57%. If I bet £100 on Biden at this price, I will win £70 (in addition to getting back my £100 stake).

 

At 02:17 GMT, the betting odds flipped (at least temporarily) in favour of Trump. In other words, Biden commands a longer price than Trump at this time.

 

Edit: 5 minutes later, the odds for Trump had strengthened much more (he is now 58% likely to win!)

Suddenly my post from some four hours ago which said "The odds [on Biden] are too rich to let this opportunity go waste" is sounding reckless.

Edited November 4, 2020 by shyams

[shyams]

OK, it is getting very late and I am unable to stay awake. So here's the situation:

 

According to betting markets, Trump is currently 80% likely to be reelected. Betting markets rarely get it wrong so late in the play --- so it looks like Trump is your President for 4 more years.

 

I guess I will check again after I grab a small nap for 2-3 hours. It is unlikely that things will dramatically have changed, but one can never be sure.

 

Good luck, USA. Good luck, world.

[Winstonm]

This is what democracy is up against.

 

Experts on comparative politics say the GOP is an extremist outlier, no longer belonging in the same conversation with “normal” right-wing parties like Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Instead, it more closely resembles more extreme right parties — like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey — that have actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.

This group appeals to the authoritarian* voting block - mostly whites across a wide swath of politics and economics.

*authoritarian personality

The authoritarian personality describes a type of person who prefers a social system with a strong ruler— the authoritarian person is comfortable being the strong ruler but if the individual is not the strong ruler then he or she will demonstrate complete obedience to another strong authority figure. In both cases, there is little tolerance toward nonconservative ways of thinking. People whose personalities are structured in the manner of an authoritarian personality tend to conform to authority and believe that complete obedience to rules and regulations is completely necessary; any deviation from rules is to be treated harshly. The authoritarian personality often results in people harboring antagonistic feelings towards minority groups, whether religious, ethnic, or otherwise.

[thepossum]

But what I find curious is that it tends to be supporters of competing tendencies that like to make most rules and impose most authority over all our lives. Thats what confuses me