There’s got to be a morning after
(1) Biden is now a heavy favorite to win once all the votes are counted. Michigan and Wisconsin will almost certainly go into his column. Still slightly nervous about Nevada though. Georgia would be fantastic but at the moment seems like a bit of a reach, but still definitely possible. Pennsylvania — who knows, but that would be very nice.
(2) The Senate. What a disaster. We’re looking at two years of total obstruction on the part of Moscow Mitch and Susan of the Deeply Furrowed Brow (wtf Maine?). The Senate map is very favorable to Democrats 24 months from now, but our idiot polity doesn’t understand even the Schoolhouse Rock version of our system, let alone Poli Sci 101, so it will be very hard for the Dems not to be blamed for the fact that literally nothing of any significance will get passed between now and then.
(3) Trump will never concede, and the election is close enough that his entire base will absolutely believe that the presidency was stolen. I’m trying not to be alarmist but right now it’s kind of difficult to see this country holding together for another decade or two, which just happens to be the same period when the climate crisis is going to really ramp up.
(4) Stop talking about the Latino vote. There is no Latino vote. The notion that right wing Cubans and Venezuelans have anything other than a language, loosely speaking, in common with Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans is the laziest Anglo thinking ever.
(5) It really hurts the discourse that California takes so goddamned long to report its vote. Biden is going to end up winning the popular vote by something like seven million, which by itself should be the death knell for the Electoral College — winning by seven million votes, and coming within a hair of losing the election! — but of course it won’t be because this country’s political system and accompanying culture are both bad jokes.
(6) The conventional wisdom I suppose will end up being that Trump would have cruised to re-election except for COVID, but ultimately I think the lesson of this election is it doesn’t matter at all what a Republican president does or doesn’t to — the people who vote for him literally don’t care, as long as he gives them enough of what they want, and what they want is authoritarian ethno-nationalism and Owning the Libs. Everything else, i.e., actual governance, is irrelevant.
(7) Watch how it will now turn out to be the case that Joe Biden was a Terrible Candidate Who Did It Wrong — just like in 2016 amazingly enough. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO THE DEMOCRATS RUN. Bernie would have been A Terrible Candidate — a socialist Jew! What were the Dems thinking? Warren would have been A Terrible Candidate. Pocahontas, Harvard elitist and so on. Kamala was a Cop, plus she sure seems uppity. Etc. etc etc. The problem isn’t the candidate. The problem is the country.