Wednesday, November 04, 2020

if Decision Desk's projections are correct...

This is not shaping up to be a Trump landslide.  I've been monitoring both the New York Times and Decision Desk.  If the latter's projections are correct, then Trump will eke out a victory with 296 electoral votes.  As things now stand, Decision Desk has the race at Biden 215, Trump 210.  DD's map shows 80 to 86 electoral votes probably going to Trump, including those of Pennsylvania, where Trump is currently 600,000 votes ahead.  Assuming DD's projections are correct, Trump will likely win reelection, although we haven't heard the last from the mail-in ballot crowd.  That crowd doesn't worry me too much, though:  dodgy ballots are (generally) being tossed out, and many of the legitimate mail-in ballots are going toward Trump.  The mail-in cascade won't provide the Dems with the lift they're hoping for.  So I remain quietly confident of a Trump victory, but I'll be interested to see what the pundits make of the slim margin:  there'd been a lot of talk of "shy Trump voters" and "preference cascades" and such, but if Trump is winning by only a few electoral votes, then these phenomena might not have been real.


I'm sad to see that Ilhan Omar got reelected.  Minnesotans really are idiots, aren't they.  Heard the same for Ayanna Pressley (Boston), so that's two of the four Squad members.  Murphy's Law says that Rashida Tlaib (Michigan 13th District) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NYC) will also enjoy reelection (they both currently have close to 70% of the vote, so they're in), which is too damn bad.  So the Squad will remain to harass Donald Trump for another few years.  But will the House, overall, swing to the GOP?  The Times is showing a close race currently dominated by the Republicans:  157 to 149 as of this writing.  As for the Senate:  the GOP just took the lead:  46 to 45, so I'd say a GOP Senate majority is likely.  This doesn't necessarily bode well for the Republicans, who have squandered opportunities to enact legislation before even when they've dominated all three branches of government.

My prediction:  Trump will win, but only by a nose.  As in 2016, there will be no landslide.

UPDATE:  the latest DD projection gives Trump a win with 283 electoral votes.  Political gurus like Styx are talking darkly about constitutional crises and such, given the left-Dem vote-harvesting shenanigans.  We'll see, I guess.  I've voted, and I'm in Korea, so I've done my duty, and I'm not in a position to go storm City Hall or lobby my local congressman to insist that such-and-such state should ratify the vote tally.  It's all up to Cthulhu now.




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