Shitty morning

Ugh.

Election day is weird

For months all the news leads up to this one big day building up to this massive crescendo. And then we get here and there's basically no news to report until 8pm.

For what it's worth...

...here is my prediction of how the presidential election will go.

Of the swing states, I'm predicting that Harris wins PA, WI, AZ, NC, and NV, but loses GA and MI (also that Harris will get that one electoral vote from NE and Trump will get that one from ME). I am least secure about my prediction for NV. If I had made that map 10 minutes earlier, I might have colored that state red. But even without NV, I predict that Harris wins.

How confident am I about the above prediction? Not very. More than in prior years, this year feels more like a guess than a reasoned conclusion. The main reason for that is that I think polling is fundamentally broken right now. Now that everyone uses cell phones with caller ID and we have a well-entrenched culture of not answering phone calls from numbers we don't know, response rates are abysmally low. To compensate, pollsters have used expanded the small adjustments they used to make to assure it was a representative sample into huge adjustments. That change magnifies the effects of their assumptions to such an extent that the polls are more about the assumptions than actual data. In other word, I no longer think that polls are an accurate snapshot of candidate's support. Instead they are more about the biases and group-think within the polling industry. And yet, what else do I have to go on? I can rely on the pollsters biases or my own. I don't think either are likely to be accurate. And yet, this map is a hybrid of both of those unreliable things.

I should add, I created my first draft of this map before the Selzer poll came out showing Harris in a surprising lead in Iowa. I get that Selzer has a better track record than other polls. And I understand that in 2016 and 2020, her poll was one of the few (or maybe the only) one that detected determinative shifts in the electorate. But Selzer's polls still have the same low-response issue that all the other polls have. And two prior good calls is too low of a success rate to definitively establish her poll as more predictive than the others. The N is too low. It could just be two lucky guesses.

However, if Selzer was on to something, then the whole map would look different. Not just a blue Iowa. If Iowa is going for Harris because of a surge of women voters motivated by reproductive rights, then other red states on my map will be blue too. I would love it if Harris did win by a total blowout. That may be the only scenario that saves the country from Trump's post-election shenanigans posing a serious threat to democracy. But I'm not willing to rewrite my prediction on the basis of a single poll, even if it is the famed Selzer poll. It is still just a poll with a low response rate.

Nice try Jeff

 Bezos defends his decision to kill the WaPo's Presidential endorsement by:

1. Making it clear that the claims of William Lewis (the paper's publisher and CEO) that the decision to not endorse a presidential candidate this year was not Bezos' decision and had nothing to do with him, was utter bullshit.
2. Arguing that presidential endorsements only create a perception of bias that undermines the paper's mission. Which is an argument. But it doesn't explain why the Post is just stopping presidential endorsements. Wouldn't any endorsement create a perception of bias? (and for that matter, doesn't putting the opinion piece of the paper's billionaire owner at the very top of the Washington Post home page create a huge perception of bias?)
3. Demonstrating that all those cancelations do matter to Bezos.

This is really bad

Trump’s fascist takeover of America is already happening.

It is not too late to stop it.

Why I'm not *that* worried about Trump stealing the PA vote

By "stealing" I mean if he loses Pennsylvania but somehow turns it into a win through a bunch of bullshit lawsuits.

Trump's problem if he is trying to create a legal steal of PA's electorate votes is that the State government is entirely controlled by Democrats and the State Supreme Court has a liberal majority. The legal bullshit he tried to pull in Georgia in 2020 when he called Raffensperger to get him to "find" more votes won't work here. While the Secretary of State, Al Schmidt, is a Republican. He famously refused to go along with Trump in 2020, and testified before the January 6th commission, which is why Josh Shapiro (PA"s democratic governor) appointed him.

So I just don't think there is much Trump can do to overturn a loss here. At least not on the state level. The federal courts might be a different story, however. But the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers PA) is not a particularly rightwing court. Of the 13 Judges on the Court who are fully active (not on "senior status"), there is a bare Republican appointment majority (7 were appointed by Bush or Trump vs. 6 by Obama or Biden), but there is also a vacancy, which probably won't get filled in time because of a bullshit racist smear against Biden's nominee. Still, the Bush appointees did not put up with Trump's bullshit in 2020, so I doubt they will now. On the other hand, Sam Alito is the Supreme Court Justice who is in charge of the Circuit.

Still, compared with other swing states where the government is more divided, I'm more confident that the people in charge of Pennsylvania will not be receptive to overturning a Harris win here.

The last chance for a "win"

The death of Yahya Sinwar may have been the last chance that Israel gets to claim victory in the war in Gaza. They could have claimed to have "destroyed Hamas" after killing so many of its best known pre-war figures (Ismael Haniyeh, Muhammed Deif, Salih al-Arouri, and now Sinwar), called any remaining resistance "the remnants of Hamas," and said announce that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and enter into a ceasefire with those remnants immediately upon the release of the remaining hostages. The end of hostilities in Gaza is what Hezbollah demanded for their own ceasefire, so that could also be a basis for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon.

But of course that couldn't happen because Netanyahu doesn't want the war to end. If he stops slaughtering Gazans than his coalition will probably fall, he will cease to be Prime Minister, and will probably end up in jail. His party is openly planning to put Jewish settlements in ethnically cleansed Gaza and some members of his coalition are proposing settlements in Southern Lebanon. Because his position depends entirely upon racists monsters, Netanyahu will never stop the killing until he is forced to (which also makes him a racist monster).

I wonder if Biden has also missed an opportunity to try force an end to the conflict. He also could have announced that Sinwar's death marks the end of Hamas, told Israel that any further hostilities would require a suspension of all military aid to Israel. I'm not sure if it would work. Bibi wants and needs the war to continue so badly, it is far from certain whether anything that the U.S. does would really force an end to the conflict. But it would put even more pressure on Netanyahu to stop, far more than they have faced so far. Maybe it would cause Netanyahu's government to fall. But even if not, it would severely limit what the Israeli military could do, and create a a degree of international isolation far beyond what Israel has experienced in the past few decades, maybe ever.

But I don't know how Biden doing something like that would play out in American domestic politics. We are less than three weeks from a national election. There's a real risk it would upset pro-Israeli Democrats, and one year into this atrocious war, would be far too late to win back any pro-Palestinian voters who have already turned against the Democrats. The election is too close and because of our own poisonous political culture, I can see a lot more risks than benefits if I am thinking purely in terms of electoral calculations.

Part of me really hopes the Biden Administration starts acting radically differently towards Israel once the election is over. That's probably wishful thinking. I don't think that Biden is supporting Israel's belligerence purely out of some political calculation. But even if Harris wins the election and Biden is then inclined to make a serious attempt to force Israel to stop its war, the window for Israel to spin this as a victory will probably have closed. The odd thing about so-called "supporters of Israel" who cheer on this war is they are guaranteeing that Israel will lose.