Mackeyser wrote:

We need a 3rd party, specifically a part of the left so damn badly,

Big shout out to the Democratic party and Chuck Schumer for derailing black Progressive State Representative Charles Booker (Medicare For All, Green New Deal) in favor of Amy McGrath, who has never won an election. https://t.co/vUSkS93ca8

— Jim Earl (@jimearl666) November 4, 2020

This is 60 million of your neighbors pic.twitter.com/Pg8KH6pgiZ

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) November 4, 2020

#BREAKING: Large, animated crush of “stop the count” protestors trying to push their way into TCF hall in #Detroit where ballots are being counted.

They’re being blocked by guards at the door.

Pizza boxes are pushed against the window to obstruct view. It’s tense. @NBCNews pic.twitter.com/zFhzd88skX

— Steve Patterson (@PattersonNBC) November 4, 2020

Trump can’t just ask the Supreme Court to stop ballot counting, GOP election lawyer tells CNN

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-cant-just-ask-supreme-095738297.html

President Trump early Wednesday said he thinks he won the presidential race, prematurely claimed victory in states that still have millions of votes uncounted, and said he will ask the Supreme Court to halt the vote count — or stop the “voting,” as he said. Officials in Pennsylvania and other states that won’t finish counting votes for hours or days vowed that every ballot will be counted. And legal experts said Trump can’t really just petition the Supreme Court to halt the counting of legally cast votes.

Ben Ginsberg, who spent decades as a top Republican Party election lawyer, told CNN’s Jake Tapper early Wednesday that even if Trump did have a mechanism to petition an end to the vote counting or toss out votes, that request would “be viewed by any court, including the Supreme Court, as just a massive disenfranchisement that would be frowned upon.”

Tapper asked Ginsberg, who was national counsel to George W. Bush’s campaign in the Florida recount, if he had seen anything like Trump’s statement. “No, not even close,” he said. Ginsberg retired over the summer, then started criticizing Trump’s constant and baseless claims of voter fraud.

Trump’s “unsubstantiated talk about ‘rigged’ elections caused by absentee ballot ‘fraud’ and ‘cheating’ has been around since 2016,” Ginsberg wrote in The Washington Post last week. But “this is not about finding fraud and irregularities. It’s about suppressing the number of votes not cast for Trump.” CBS News estimates that there are five million legally cast votes left to be counted in the five uncalled swing states.

man… he called it WORD for WORD. pic.twitter.com/9uBn1Sm8xa

— hector (@onikasgivenchy) November 4, 2020

Between this and the disgraceful smearing of Corbyn, it's pretty clear that for liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, the true Machiavellian passion is saved for knifing the left, not slaying actual right wing monsters.

Which is unfortunate, and not just for the knifed left.

— Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) November 4, 2020

LOL @ “Poles”

Unreal that so many of you voted for this fucking moron a second time. pic.twitter.com/k9q6s1sLLN

— SeattleRams (@seattlerams_nfl) November 4, 2020

waterfield wrote:

we live in a very, very, conservative country. And as our population grows older we will continue in this direction. The older we become the more conservative we become. The older we become the more apolitical we become. The more apolitical we become the more politically ignorant we become. The more politically ignorant we become the more children we have that will become politically ignorant. The more politically ignorant we become the more macho sound bites become important.

The older some become, the fewer old ones there are, and the younger the country becomes.

I have never in my lifetime seen figures in political office like AOC or Cori Bush, who just won in Missouri.

The young educate themselves my friend. My daughters are very politically savvy and they did not get what they know from me or my wife–they learn it on their own.

Don’t Expect a Contested Election

Charlie Cook

Charlie Cook, one of the best political handicappers in the business

https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/dont-expect-contested-election?fbclid=IwAR20Sl1_IWmpemvxPx_iflTN44IokKLVNherCPomFV5WEHprcBw_e2Y-v6M

On a hundred-odd Zoom meetings, webinars, and conference call speeches that I’ve participated in over the past two months, virtual attendees continue to raise the possibility of a contested presidential election, even though the chances of that have been getting smaller all the time. Every day that Trump remains behind in the polls, outspent badly and with the early vote gushing in, the cone of uncertainty narrows, and the odds of such an upset goes down.

Joe Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes seems pretty straightforward: Hold all 20 states (plus the District of Columbia) that Hillary Clinton carried four years ago, which total 232 electoral votes, just 38 short of the majority threshold of 270. Then win each of the three states that Clinton lost by eight-tenths of a point or less: Michigan (0.2 percentage points) Pennsylvania (0.7), and Wisconsin (0.8). That gives him 278 electoral votes, eight more than needed. Biden will likely also carry two congressional districts that eluded Clinton in 2016, Nebraska’s 2nd District and Maine’s 2nd, giving him 280 electoral votes. That would represent a “skinny” Biden win.

A big Biden win would bring in Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, and might also include one or two states from the next tier, mostly likely Georgia or Iowa, although don’t count out Ohio or Texas. Generally speaking, Trump is underperforming his 2016 pace by 3 to 8 points, depending upon the state or district.

The RealClearPolitics average of national polls pegs Biden’s lead at 7.4 points, 51.1 to 43.7 percent. But that’s a less discriminating measure, including as it does some mediocre surveys, some that seemed congenitally slanted toward one side or the other, and some that would be better utilized lining hamster cages. The FiveThirtyEight modeled average of national polls, which is more selective than the RCP average but still includes some surveys that I consider rather sketchy, puts the Biden lead at 8.8 points, 52 to 43.2 percent.

I believe his actual lead is more like 9 or 10 points, based on the higher-quality, live-telephone-interview national polls conducted since the first debate, as well as the gold standard of online polling, the Pew Research Center’s mammoth poll of 11,929 voters released two weeks ago.

Any way you slice it, these are pretty good leads, considerably higher than the 3.2-point national margin that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in the RCP average on Oct. 29, 2016. When all the votes were counted, the margin ended up being 2.1 percent.

In fact, one of the stories of this election is how Democrats have opened their checking accounts to candidates and causes this year. As reported by Advertising Analytics on Wednesday, the Biden campaign has bought $626 million in TV time, $268 million more than Trump’s $358 million by the Trump effort.

All told, Advertising Analytics reported that political campaigns and causes dropped $8.12 billion in TV ads so far this cycle— $4.633 billion by Democrats on all levels, $2.606 million by Republicans, and $907 million by independents. Of the $2.948 billion spent on television by presidential campaigns, $2.163 billion came for Democratic candidates to $780 million for Republicans. Senate candidates spent $2 billion, $1.130 million spent by or for Democrats and $870 million by or for Republicans. Of the $1.105 billion spent on House advertising, the split was $649 million on the Democratic side, $500 million for Republicans.

Democratic donors have bucked recent trends to deliver a substantial spending advantage for their side, voting with their wallets long before anyone voted with a ballot. Democrats have had their hair on fire since Election Night 2016 and that has shown no sign of abating. In my judgement, a landslide is more likely than a contested election.

The House looks likely to see Republicans lose a few more seats on top of the 40 they dropped in 2018. If the over/under is 10 seats, I tend to come down on the higher side.

The Senate is increasingly less a case of whether Democrats will take a majority, but how large will it be. The chances of the GOP keeping its losses down to a seat or two are dropping; I am thinking that a five- or six-seat gain is becoming highly possible. The three most likely GOP incumbents to lose are Martha McSally in Arizona, Cory Gardner in Colorado, and Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Right on the bubble are Joni Ernst in Iowa, Susan Collins in Maine, and both Georgia seats. A touch back from that are Steve Daines in Montana and Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, as well as the open seat in Kansas. All three states are likely to be won by Trump, so look for a possible repeat of 2016, when every Senate race went to the same party that won the presidential race there—the first time that had happened since the start of direct Senate elections in 1914.

What I am wondering is if this will be one or the rarest species of national elections—a wave election in a presidential year ending in a zero, meaning it will reverberate for a decade thanks to the coming redistricting. There are not a dozen Republican Senate seats that could fall, as Democrats suffered in 1980, but Joe Biden may well replicate Ronald Reagan’s 10-point victory over President Carter. The odds are it will be a bit less, perhaps in the 53 to 44 percent range, with 3 percent going to independents and write-ins, half of the number from four years ago.

We’ll soon know. It won’t be long now.