The current voting rate is about 275,000 ballots per hour, 24/7

One thing that we haven’t really adjusted to psychologically is that the election really is happening right now, rather than 12 days from now. I just checked, and 16 million votes have been cast just since Tuesday morning. The total is up to nearly 31 million, and it’s quite possible that will be up to close to 100,000,000 by the end of next week.

People are engaging in all sorts of consultations of the auguries regarding what the available stats tell us so far. I’m not going to delve into that although of course you’re free to do so.

Here’s some words of wisdom from my friend Steve the atmospheric science, who I’ve known for nearly 30 years and is one of the calmest people I know.

Your moment of Zen:

I was basically paralyzed with dark thoughts for several days after Election Day 2016. Things I’m trying to keep in mind to avoid a repeat.

1. At least this time it won’t be a shock. At best this is 50-50, not the 90-10 everyone thought 2016 was.

2. I don’t care, at all, about being the prescient guy who saw that X outcome was obviously coming. Who can see what the proper campaign strategy should have been, what message should have been emphasized instead, which VP should have been selected. Yeah the scenario where PA is the decider and it goes red by 0.3 points is in play, and then Walz looks like a catastrophic error. OTOH, the deep Democratic faultline on I/P has been kept to minor rumbles and maybe in the Shapiro universe it goes Loma Prieta. This is not fundamentally a sports contest where we fans are playing GM. Harris’s campaign has seemed fine, and certainly if I were running it it would have gone much worse.

I am exorcising all versions of “I’ve been saying for years” out of my thought processes. It doesn’t help anything. Release all concerns about being savvy.

This looks like a coin flip, maybe slightly weighted red, and a coin flip includes little correlated polling errors which turn most swing states one way or the other. If you know better, congrats. Go make some money I guess.

3. If he wins, it’s not in any sense my fault. Nor yours. We’ve registered our disgust, we’ve voted, we’ve donated, we’ve argued. If victorious, Trumpers will say it is our fault. “This is how you got Trump” will be the refrain, but fuck no. The correct analysis is that he’s the fault of the people who voted for him (and protected him from consequence, MITCH), not people who voted against him. It’s simplistic I know.

4. Important to keep in mind that this is not happening to each of us alone. Half the country will know what’s coming and many of them will fight against it. We’ll lose a lot of battles, but maybe not all of them. History does not end here.

5. It will be much worse for other people than me. He might very well kill my job, but hell I’m 57 and fortunate enough to be able to survive if I retired right now. That’s at least different from 2016. And for whatever reason he didn’t care about killing my job then anyway. So submitting to despair, or washing my hands of it all and tending to my garden will be kind of selfish. Maybe the same for you, given the demographics of the board. Helping other people will be the play.

I don’t know, that’s all I got. And who knows, maybe we’ll win.