What’s That Smell? Nervousness.

Toilet Water is right

There are just six days to go before it’s “Election Day” which really means “the end of the election” which really means “the end of the voting for the election.”  What happens both before and after that is why I’m nervous.

This isn’t 2016.  Back then, I expected my candidate to win and I expected a peaceful transfer of power, no matter who won.  Neither of those expectations exist now.

I actually looked back at this blog to see what I wrote about it.  Plenty afterwards, but only two comments beforehand.  Neither were terribly earth-moving – in one, I compared Trump to Herbert Hoover, the explanation being that Hoover, even after 3 years of the Great Depression, still managed to get 40% of the vote.  The idea here was that whatever our expectations of Clinton, Trump would in fact get plenty of support.  I could not believe that he got as much as he did, and even though he did not win the popular vote, you know the rest of the story (narrow wins in MI, WI, and PA gives him the Elector College edge).

We’re pretty much there again.  Practically no one gives Trump a chance of winning the popular vote nationwide, but there’s lots of wiggle room for him to eke out another EC victory. 

And that’s before you consider the X and Y factors.

The X factor is cheating.  We on the left are convinced that Trump will TRY to cheat – whether he’ll be successful (or successful enough) is up for debate.  It’s pretty much the Trump M.O. – what you can’t do legally, do anyway.  He’s destroyed most norms and ignored the rules for the last 3+ years – why would anyone expect any different now?  We don’t REALLY know what happened in 2016.  We didn’t have eight Benghazi-like hearings on the matter.  The Mueller report got swept under the rug and wasn’t even the subject of his impeachment.  Don’t get me started – hell, I thought I cheated to win the Republican primary.

The Y factor is lawsuits and the Supreme Court.  We’ve seen countless suits by the GOP to make it more difficult for people to vote – fewer drop boxes, fewer voting machines in heavily Democratic areas, limits on receiving mail-in ballots, correcting ballots, etc.  We’ve seen the USPS hit by sabotage to slow the mails.  And we know Trump is “lawyering up” getting ready to send results he doesn’t like to the now-friendly-to-the-right courts, all the way up to SCOTUS.  I’m sure many on the right feel confident knowing “the fix is in.”  Again, whether than fix is enough to overcome an extraordinary commitment from the left remains to be seen.

And frankly, that’s the other reason I am nervous.  What happens AFTER Election Day?

That’s the big mystery, and one I’ll tackle in a later post.