The other day I described how unexpectedly emotional filling out the oval on my ballot was when I voted. In case you missed it, Team Biden’s excellent ad shop managed to distill that feeling into a 30-second clip:
Uncle Joe, this is a brilliant ad. @JoeBiden pic.twitter.com/Va0gGSzmzn
— the greg (@mistergeezy) October 29, 2020
In the morning thread, we were talking about this NYT tidbit about Trump canceling his election night victory shindig at his DC hotel. Why did he cancel? I speculated that he knows there’s a damn good chance he’ll be humiliatingly defeated and would rather lock himself up in the residence to tweet-scream about VOTER FRAUD and stress-eat Big Macs.
Kay said he’s been working out the idea of losing at his rallies, and that’s true. He told cultists in NC “you’ll never see me again” if Biden wins and speculated in Macon, GA that he “might have to leave the country” if he loses. He says those things in what passes for a “joking” tone, but Trump has no real sense of humor. There’s always an angry or cruel edge to it.
No one knows what the future holds, least of all me. But imagine for a moment that we deliver the electoral smack-down Trump and his Republican enablers deserve — if we sweep them out of power the way Charlie Cook is now predicting:
I believe [Biden’s] 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…
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.
If that happens, we would replace a malevolent, incompetent and clownish administration and Congress with a decent, experienced and serious one come January 20th. That’s the important thing.
But because I’m a spite voter now, I also hope to witness the ugliest intra-party recriminations the Republicans have experienced since 1960. I wasn’t alive for that one, so I’m eager to see Trump go after people with both barrels, which he will because he’ll convince himself they failed him. And it won’t be Democrats in his sights; it will be Republicans.
I believe this because, as it’s sinking in that he might lose, Trump is lashing out at allies, including his most servile supporters and Fox News. He’s added “joking” threats and casual cruelty to his sycophants to the usual stump repertoire of lies about Democrats.
He threatened to “fire” Florida Governor DeSantis if Florida goes blue. He humiliated Martha McSally. Just yesterday he threatened Florida’s GOP chair if Trump doesn’t win Florida. At 3 o’clock this morning, Trump threatened the SCOTUS justices he appointed to either help him out with the election or become irrelevant.
To repeat, who the hell knows what’s going to happen? Not me! But I offer these speculations on the happy topic of post-election intra-mural Republican blood-letting to balance the doom-scrolling that we 2016 PTSD sufferers perhaps too frequently indulge in. Maybe it’ll be elected Republicans who say, with Bidenesque exasperation, “Just shut up, man.” Open thread!