The Daily Parker

It's early, and nothing shocking has yet occurred, I'm actually watching The Bear. But some returns have come in. The Post has called West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky for the XPOTUS and Vermont for Harris. Again, no surprises. Early (<25%) returns in several states have the XPOTUS ahead, but as we've seen many times, Republican precincts report early, on average.

But let's see the 8pm ET returns...and, in a shock, the Post calls Mississippi for the 1850s.

To be continued...

19:04 CST: Nothing surprising. Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma turn red, and Maryland and southern New England turns blue.

20:10 CST: Still no surprises. We knew we'd lose Joe Manchin's US Senate seat, and we figured we'd pick up the North Carolina governor's mansion. And, of course, everyone has called Illinois for Harris. All of the swing states are still swinging, with Harris leading Michigan and Pennsylvania, but the XPOTUS leading Georgia and N.C. The bigs have called Ohio for the XPOTUS.

In what I am sure will turn out to be a mirage, Harris leads in Kansas and Missouri, and the XPOTUS in Virginia.

And it looks like the Florida referendum legalizing abortion through the 24th week will fail.

Nothing yet in local races, except the Democratic candidate for Illinois Attorney General, Eileen O'Neill Burke, looks like she'll win.

21:09 CST: The map still looks a lot like it did at this time in 2020. By "a lot" I mean identical. We picked up Colorado and lost Utah, for example. All the swing states show the XPOTUS in the lead but, then again, so does Minnesota. So, no one knows nothing. I guess I'll post again in an hour, at which point we should have the West Coast states.

But the three that will decide the election—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—won't be called for days. The one thing that I have seen in the drill-down, though, is an even starker urban/rural divide, which is not good for the country in the long term.

22:02 CST: Wow, The Bear is fantastic. I see why it got all those Emmys. Oh, and we won California while they took Idaho. Still looking almost exactly like 2020.

22:07 CST: Just a reminder that four years ago, the AP didn't call Wisconsin until 3pm Central on Wednesday. And no one called Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Michigan for many hours after that. This clearly isn't 1980, 1992, or 2004. It's, well, 2020 again. So everyone just try to sleep and check back tomorrow.

23:01 CST: Welp, we lost the Senate, with Sherrod Brown losing to yet another ultra-right kook in Ohio. Whatever else happens this week, we really have to figure out why people prefer the ultra-right kooks to sensible moderates. I'm afraid I won't like the answer.

Still too close to call the big three. But I'm not going to wait up for it. I'm disappointed in my country, but not entirely surprised.

Polls are open, votes are being tabulated, misguided youth are casting ballots for 3rd-party candidates to "send a message," and I'm just doing my thing at work.

I've got NBC's hour-by-hour guide bookmarked, though. And you should bookmark The Daily Parker; I will very likely live-blog again tonight, though I have promised myself to go to bed before 11 CST (unlike in 2016).

And here's my starting point, which is basically the consensus map minus Iowa and Arizona:

I'm not worried. Look, the Roman Republic fell in 49 BCE, and it only took Italy about 1,995 years to return to democracy. So why fret?

(Oh, dear. Re-reading my 2016 live blog, I see I ended with this: "Millions of people who voted for Donald Trump tonight will expect their lives to improve, with America returning to the imagined past of 'Leave It to Beaver.' What happens when they're disappointed? Which Visigoths do they invite to sack Washington?" Well, now we know.)

If you read nothing else before tomorrow night, read Tim Alberta's epic reporting on the XPOTUS's colossally dysfunctional campaign and the infants who run it. My favorite bit comes right at the end, with a quote from Joseph Goebbels Stephen Miller:

Backstage at the Garden, in the blur of debate and indecision over damage control, it was Stephen Miller who pondered the bigger picture. (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.) According to two people who were present, Miller, the Trump policy adviser whose own nativist impulses are well documented, was not offended by Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes. Yet he was angered by them all the same: He knew the campaign had just committed a huge unforced error. He believed that Bruesewitz had done profound damage to Trump’s electoral prospects. And, in that moment, he seethed at what this lack of discipline portended for Trump should he return to power.

The irony, apparently, was lost on Miller. He and his colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.

“If we can’t trust this kid with a campaign,” Miller said to the group, according to one of the people present, “how can we trust him in the White House?”

How indeed.

Only 27 hours remain until polls close in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Which means we're less than 27 hours away from the XPOTUS claiming he won, because that's how he operates. Even if he loses by 10 million votes, he'll still claim he won all the way until January 20th, and possibly even longer.

Of course, no one will know anything interesting until at least 7pm Eastern when polls close in Georgia and 7:30pm Eastern when they close in North Carolina. Arizona's polls close at 7pm Mountain, which is 8pm here in Chicago. And even though we know who will win California's 54 electoral votes—a fifth of the required 270 to win—no one can call the state officially until 8pm Pacific (10pm here in Chicago).

Other things to keep in mind:

• If the election is close, it will take longer to know the results than if it's a blowout for either candidate.
• Rural areas, which tend to vote Republican, have orders of magnitude fewer voters than urban areas, which tend to vote Democratic. This means that early returns always look better for Republicans than later returns. Expect the XPOTUS to harp on early returns and discount later ones for this reason.
• Pennsylvania can't even begin tabulating absentee ballots until tomorrow, and it will take them days to get through all of them.
• Arizona has super-long ballots this year, especially in Maricopa County (Phoenix), so counting will take a lot longer than usual.
• Georgia plans to release official numbers as early as 8pm Eastern tomorrow night, but Fulton County, which contains Atlanta, will take a lot longer.
• Milwaukee hopes to have provisional results around midnight, but again, counting could take days. And absentee ballots can continue arriving for a week.

Bottom line: until Wednesday lunchtime at the earliest, no one will really know anything if the election is close. So let's hope for a repeat (and a reversal) of 1980 and get a huge Harris victory tomorrow.

You've heard the expression "crossing the Rubicon," but you may not know the history.

In the Roman Republic, the Rubicon marked the border of Italy (read: the Home Counties/Eastern Seaboard), where it was illegal to garrison troops. In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar ran out of lawful ways to—wait for it—avoid prosecution for corruption stemming from his first term as Consul, and the Senate denied him the governorship of Cisalpine Gallus (read: the Midlands/the Midwest) which would have also granted him immunity. So he and his XIII Legion crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome to force the Senate to make him Dictator of Rome. It worked out for Caesar, but not for the Republic.

The ensuing civil war killed a good fraction of the Roman population and conclusively ended the Republic. Then just days before the end of that conflagration, Caesar had his unfortunate accident in the Senate. This led to Caesar's great-nephew Octavian becoming Emperor shortly thereafter, starting a 400-year slow-motion disintegration of Roman civilization. And the distraction of all this prepared the ground in Judea for a fundamentalist sect to break off from Judaism and go on to bury the 1500-year-old Greco-Roman religion in the archaeological dust.

The relevance of this history to current events is left as an exercise for the reader.

The sky above Chicago has nothing but sun this morning. It won't last—the forecast for tomorrow night points to July-like atmospheric moisture and epic rainfall—but Cassie and I will enjoy it as much as we can.

Maybe I should stay away from these news stories until the rain starts for real:

• Michelle Goldberg reminds all you Hannah Arendt fans that fascism takes time to establish itself, so we have perhaps a couple of years to emigrate if the XPOTUS takes power in January: "The transition from democracy to autocracy is a process, not an on-off switch."
• Jay Willis shakes his head that "Jeff Bezos doesn't understand that he is the problem:" "[T]he possibility that Americans might also not care for a rich guy leveraging his power to compromise political coverage in the middle of an up-or-down vote on fascism seems not to have occurred to him."
• Dylan Byers takes to Puck to muse about Bezos's side of the argument: "Ultimately, Bezos wants to own, and Lewis wants to manage, a paper staffed by a team that supports their vision for semi-nonpartisan, future-proofed profitability."
• Jeff Jarvis explains in the Columbia Journalism Review why liberals are infuriated with the media: "Journalists like to say they write the first draft of history. Too often that means they ignore history. Today I urge journalists to reread Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism so as to understand her historical antecedents."
• Inae Oh expands on why people not already in the bag for the XPOTUS might hate election coverage right now: "Trump’s menacing language—a constant for almost a decade—rarely draws the notice that Garbage-gate has received. To call this imbalance typical both-sidesism fails to adequately convey the failures of the media in 2024."
• Robert Wright congratulates Elon Musk on becoming America's first true oligarch: "Musk is far and away the most dramatic example of concentrated power. By virtue of his undeniable intelligence, creativity, and drive, he has wound up with an impressively diverse portfolio of influence."
• Micky Horstman, writing an op-ed in Crain's, wants public transit in Chicago that people actually want to use: "Other cities have figured out how to run a transit agency post-pandemic. Chicago can, too."

But after all of this, yesterday Jennifer Rubin made "the case for election optimism." So I'll end this post with her argument:

Americans need to retain perspective, muster up patience, let the vote counting proceed, avoid bestowing MAGA legal challenges credibility they do not deserve and insist on bipartisan recognition of the winner. We can do this, America.

Yes, we can.

Very busy day—I'll explain more tomorrow—so all I have to say right now is, I can't wait until Wednesday. I voted yesterday, so the 90% of my inbox taken up by the Democratic Party and various candidates all pleading for something represents a lot of wasted time and bytes.

Not to mention the dozens of spam texts I receive. Thank you, T-Mobile, for shunting those away from me.

Just stop, y'all. I live in Chicago, I've already voted, and I gave money where it mattered most this cycle. You're wasting my time. Just stop.

In a decision that literally no one liked (except the XPOTUS's re-election campaign), Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris last week. As of today, the Post has lost 200,000 subscribers—about 10% of them—and Bezos has responded to his critics:

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

Josh Marshall calls bullshit:

In Bezos’ case he has multiple companies that do extensive government contracting. When Trump was President, Amazon very credibly sued the Trump administration for choosing Microsoft’s cloud hosting service over Amazon’s for a major Pentagon contract. He also owns the Blue Origin space delivery company. Needless to say, Amazon is a walking, talking advertisement for anti-trust enforcement. You may want the DOJ to crack down on Amazon’s practices. But that’s not the point. It’s a massive cudgel hanging over Bezos’ company and wealth.

Bezos addressed many of these issues in the op-ed he published late yesterday in the Post. I found the piece uncomfortable to read. He was refreshingly candid on certain points and he made some good points. Everything I’ve heard about his decade as owner backs up his claim that he’s given the paper complete freedom to report on his various companies. The whole thing was pretty good except for the rather central fact that his explanation for why he made the decision he did was entirely unconvincing. Not even close.

[A] lawless authoritarian government can up the ante way beyond contracts and regulatory enforcement. But a future Trump administration likely doesn’t need to. With someone like Jeff Bezos, it can do all sorts of damage under the general cloak of discretionary authority. There’s no right to a government contract and proving political interference must be quite difficult. Indeed, the way the Supreme Court now interprets the law, it’s not entirely clear to me why the President wouldn’t be at liberty just to overrule a contracting decision because he doesn’t like the owner of the company.

Or, as New Republic writer Timothy Noah pointed out, "the Post, along with other institutions and people that allow themselves to get intimidated into silence, invite a second Trump administration to intimidate them further. That’s how bullying works."

We have seven days to kick the XPOTUS to the curb. Let's see the back of him, once and for all.

PS: As a bonus, Anita Hill has an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times worth reading.

"Nice democracy you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it..."—XPOTUS (paraphrased).

The man whose presidency did more damage to our country than any since James Buchanan's and wants another ride on the pony spent yesterday rallying the brownshirts at Madison Square Garden in an event his own supporters equated with the infamous Nazi rally there in 1939.

But I have to agree with Michael Tomasky this morning, when he says we "may as well spend this last week feeling confident:"

To put it simply, liberals tend toward fatalism and panic; the label often employed is “bedwetters.” Did you see those new anti-trans ads? She’s doomed. Oh my God, did you see what Nate Silver just said? It’s over. Yikes, the polls in Pennsylvania just shifted seven-tenths of a point in Trump’s favor, this is a nightmare. Oh dear, the Nevada early vote totals are a disaster. And on and on and on and on: Liberals look for things to panic about.

I think it starts with the fact that liberals worry more about the world; carry more psychic weight around with them. Conservatives worry about the world too, but they do so in a very different way. Liberals love complexity, while conservatives prefer simplicity.

[M]any liberals have, whether consciously or not, absorbed the lesson from the media that they don’t really represent or speak for America, while conservatives are serenely confident that they do represent and speak for America.

The Republican Party has become so extreme that it no longer represents middle America at all. Middle America wants women to own their reproductive freedom. Middle America wants sensible gun laws. Middle America wants the superrich to pay more taxes. Middle America wants a higher minimum wage, more housing, and more investments made in the middle class.

[F]reaking out and panicking just contributes to an overall atmosphere that helps the other side. Don’t do it. Fatalism is the opium of the people.

Josh Marshall points out that while the polls appear to say the election will be close, they're actually saying the election is actually uncertain:

I think there’s more uncertainty than usual because of 1) rapid changes in the polling industry in response to evolving technology, 2) methodological changes in response to polls twice underestimating Donald Trump’s electoral strength, and 3) the steep and inherent difficulties of separating what about the 2020 election was embedded electoral trends and what was the COVID pandemic. So yes, I really do think there are more question marks, more debatable assumptions packaged into the analyses than usual.

Of course, if the polls said that either candidate was 15 points ahead this would all mostly be moot. We know that the race is at least fairly close. That’s why all these factors are in play. And that’s a good way to conclude on the expectations setting — that I’m not saying some sort of blow out in either direction is likely. Just that it might not actually be that close. And we should be careful to distinguish between these two things — close and uncertain.

But just to remind everyone what's on the line here, even if the XPOTUS won't do all the anti-democratic and anti-American things he has threatened to do, the people coming with him will try to remake the country in ways that almost no one outside their Christian Nationalist bubble wants. To that end, I give you: Stop Project 2025, the web comic. That's right: if you're at all confused about what the extreme right will do should they get into power, this series of comics will explain it.

Happy Monday.

I filled out my ballot yesterday and will deliver it to one of Chicago's early-voting drop-offs today or Monday. Other than a couple of "no" votes for judicial retention (a bizarre ritual we go through in Illinois), I voted pretty much as you would expect. I even voted for a couple of Republicans! (Just not for any office that could cause damage to the city or country.)

Meanwhile, the world continues to turn:

• Matt Yglesias makes "a positive case for Kamala Harris:" "[A]fter eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives. ... [I]f you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress."
• Eugene Robinson excoriates CNN (and by implication a good chunk of the MSM) for covering the XPOTUS as if he were a normal political candidate and not, you know, an election and a Reichstag fire from crippling the modern world: "Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away."
• Ezra Klein spends 45 minutes explaining that what's wrong with the XPOTUS isn't just the obvious, but the fact that no one around him is guarding us from his delusional disinhibitions: "What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him."
• James Fallows, counting down to November 5th, calls out civic bravery: "There are more of us than there are of them."
• Fareed Zakaria warns that the Democratic Party hasn't grokked the political realignment going on in the United States right now: "The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right."
• Pamela Paul points out the inherent nihilism of "settler colonialism" ideology as it applies to the growing anti-Israel movement in left-wing academia: "Activists and institutions can voice ever louder and longer land acknowledgments, but no one is seriously proposing returning the United States to Native Americans. Similarly, if “From the river to the sea” is taken literally, where does that leave Israeli Jews, many of whom were exiled not only from Europe and Russia, but also from surrounding Muslim states?"
• Hitachi has won a $212m contract to—wait for it—remove 5.25-inch floppy disks from the San Francisco MUNI light-rail network.
• American Airlines has rolled out a tool that will make an annoying sound if a gate louse attempts to board before his group number is called. Good.
• SMU writing professor Jonathan Malesic harrumphs that college kids don't read books anymore.

Speaking of books, The Economist just recommended yet another book to put on my sagging "to be read" bookshelves (plural). Nicholas Cornwell (writing as Nick Harkaway), the son of David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré), has written a new George Smiley novel set in 1963. I've read all the Smiley novels, and this one seems like a must-read as well: "Karla’s Choice could have been a crude pastiche and a dull drama. Instead, it is an accomplished homage and a captivating thriller. It may be a standalone story, but with luck Mr Harkaway will continue playing the imitation game." Excellent.