The Cosmopolitan Globalist Election Fandango

... ends in disaster.

I managed to drift off, then woke up to the news that Trump had won. I’ve begun writing about what this means, but I may be too tired to write anything worth reading. In any case, I’ll publish that separately and we’ll bring this fandango to a close.

Here are a few random things running through my head, in no special order.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Things for which I’m grateful:

• The immediate prospect of major violence in the US is lower than it would have been had Harris won. By “immediate,” I mean, “between now and the inauguration.” I have no idea what will happen beyond that.

• It was decisive. It didn’t go to the Supreme Court. There’s really no ambiguity.

• This must give some comfort to Hillary Clinton. I’ve always felt bad for her—how she must have replayed every moment of that campaign in her head, regretting every misstep.

• While I don’t trust Trump to keep any campaign promise, I’m enjoying the fond thought that he might keep his promise to deport every miserable Hamas sympathizer in America—and especially in Michigan.

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This column by Carlos Lozada seems too polished to have been written in an hour, so I assume he wrote it before the election. (Newspapers do this all the time, especially with obituaries.) I’d be curious to read the one he was hoping to publish.

He writes that it’s time to accept it: Trump is exactly who we are:

… There have been so many attempts to explain away Trump’s hold on the nation’s politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary. … We can now let go of such illusions. … Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. …

In recent years, I’ve often wondered if Trump has changed America or revealed it. I decided that it was both—that he changed the country by revealing it. After Election Day 2024, I’m considering an addendum: Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American, he is.

… We had plenty of excuses, some exculpatory, some damning. The hangover of the Great Recession. Exhaustion with forever wars. A racist backlash against the first Black president. A populist surge in America and beyond. Deaths of despair. If not for this potent mix, surely no one like Trump would ever have come to power. If only the Clinton campaign had focused more on Wisconsin. If only African American turnout had been stronger in Michigan. If only WikiLeaks and private servers and “deplorables” and so much more. If only.

Now we’ll come up with more, no matter how contradictory or consistent they may be. If only Harris had been more attuned to the suffering in Gaza, or more supportive of Israel. If only she’d picked Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, as her running mate. If only the lingering fury over Covid had landed at Trump’s feet. If only Harris hadn’t been so centrist, or if only she weren’t such a California progressive, hiding all those positions she’d let slip in her 2019 campaign. If only Biden hadn’t waited so long to withdraw from the race, or if only he hadn’t mumbled stuff about garbage.

Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant. She called him divisive, angry, aggrieved. And that was a smart case to make if, deep down, most voters held democracy dear (except maybe they didn’t) and if so many of them weren’t already angry (except they were). If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was bad, then Harris was the right candidate with the right message at the right moment. The prosecutor who would defeat the felon.

But the voters heard her case, and they still found for the defendant. A politician who admires dictators and says he’ll be one for a day, whose former top aides regard as a threat to the Constitution—a document he believes can be “terminated” when it doesn’t suit him—has won power not for one day but for nearly 1,500 more. What was considered abnormal, even un-American, has been redefined as acceptable and reaffirmed as preferable.

The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. … She even urged voters to watch Trump’s rallies—to witness his line-crossing, norm-obliterating moments—as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him.

It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it …

The Democrats … raised absurd amounts of cash. They pushed the incumbent president, the standard-bearer of their party, out of the race, once it became clear he would not win. They replaced him with a younger, more dynamic candidate who proceeded to trounce Trump in their lone presidential debate.

None of it was enough. …

This time, that choice came with full knowledge of who Trump is, how he behaves in office and what he’ll do to stay there. … The rationalization of 2016—that Trump was a protest vote by desperate Americans trying to send a message to the establishment of both parties—is no longer operative. The grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden, that carnival of insults against everyone that the speakers do not want in their America, was not an anomaly but a summation. It was Trumpism’s closing argument, and it landed.

… We don’t call this period “the Trump era” just because the once and future president won lots of votes and has now prevailed in two presidential contests. It remained the Trump era even when Biden exiled him to Mar-a-Lago for four years. It is the Trump era because Trump has captured not just a national party but also a national mood, or at least enough of it. …

For those who have long insisted that Trump is “not who we are,” that he does not represent American values, there are now two possibilities: Either America is not what they thought it was, or Trump is not as threatening as they think he is. I lean to the first conclusion, but I understand that, over time, the second will become easier to accept. A state of permanent emergency is not tenable; weariness and resignation eventually win out. As we live through a second Trump term, more of us will make our accommodations. We’ll call it illiberal democracy, or maybe self-care.

… I remember when I thought Trump wasn’t normal. But now he is, no matter how fiercely I cling to that memory.

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One of our readers sent me this column by Tyler Cohen. It’s a list of reasons for the unpopularity of the Democrats, and I think it’s probably about right. But it doesn’t explain the central mystery: You can believe all of these things about the Democrats—I believe most of them—but it just doesn’t explain why you’d accept the risk of putting Donald Trump in office. The cure is so much worse than the disease that it simply makes no sense.

1. Trump and his team understand that we now live in a world of social media.  Only a modest part of the Democratic establishment has mastered the same.

2. The “Trumpian Right,” whether you agree with it or not, has been more intellectually alive and vital than the Progressive Left, at least during the last five years, maybe more.  Being fully on the outs, those people were more free to be creative, noting that I am not equating creative with being correct. [Claire—I can’t agree here. Perhaps if you define “Trumpian Right” as “a few clever writers at Compact magazine” and “Progressive Left” as the Oberlin Department of Women’s Studies, it’s true. But overall, MAGA is an intellectual void, and the Democrats aren’t represented by the Progressive Left. It’s part of the party, but Kamala Harris ran a centrist campaign. The center-left-center-right spectrum has been far more fertile, intellectually, than MAGA in the past five years.]

3. The deindustrialization of America has mattered more than people expected at first, and has had longer legs, in terms of its impact on public opinion.  I would say this one is squarely in the mainstream account of the matter.

4. Many Trumpian and MAGA messages have been more in vibe with the negative contagion effects of our recent times. [By which, basically, he means that Americans have been in a bad mood.]

5. The Democrats made a big bet that trying to raise the status of blacks would be popular, but at best they had mixed results.  Some part of this failing was due to racists, some part due to immigrants with their own concerns, and some part due simply to the unpopularity of the message.

6. The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp.  The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.

7. The Obama administration brought, to some degree, both the reality and perception of being ruled by the intellectual class.  People didn’t like that.

8. Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously.

9. The relentlessly egalitarian message of Democrats is not so popular, and furthermore—since every claim must have messengers—it translates in lived practice into an “I am better than you all are” vibe.  Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously.

10. The Woke gambit has proven deeply unpopular. [For sure.]

11. Trans support has not been a winning issue for Democrats, but it is hard for them to let it go. [For sure.]

12. Immigration at the border has in fact spun out of control, and that has been a key Trump issue from the beginning of his campaign.  And I write this as a person who is very pro-immigration.  You can imagine how the immigration skeptics feel. [For sure.]

13. Higher education has been a traditional Democratic stronghold, and it remains one.  Yet its clout and credibility have fallen significantly in the last few years. [For sure.]

14. The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.” It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital. Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base. [The Democrats went after Big Tech? When? How?]

15. Various developments in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel did not help the Democratic cause. Inflation was very high, and real borrowing rates went up sharply. This is true, whether or not you think it is the fault of Biden, or Trump would have done better. Crypto came under attack. The pandemic story is complicated, and its politics would require a post of its own, but I don’t think it helped the Democrats, most of all because they ended up “owning” many of the longer-lasting school closures.

And we haven’t even gotten to “Defund the police,” the recurring rise of anti-Semitism on the left, and at least a half dozen other matters. [Yes.]

16. In very simple terms, you might say the Democrats have done a lot to make themselves unpopular, and not had much willingness to confront that. Their own messages make this hard to face up to, since they are supposed to be better people.

You might add to this:

17. Trump is funny (he is one of the great American comics in fact), and

18. Trump acts like a winner. Americans like this, and his response to the failed assassination attempt drove this point home.

19. Biden’s recent troubles, and the realization that he and his team had been running a con at least as big as the Trump one.  It has become a trust issue, not only an age or cognition issue. [Definitely.]

I agree with much of this, but it doesn’t even come close to explaining why Americans would vote for Trump. It explains why they would vote for a generic Republican, or even, perhaps, JD Vance. It doesn’t explain why they would put someone as obviously dangerous as Trump in control of a massive nuclear arsenal. It doesn’t explain why they would vote for a man who could not have warned them more clearly, in word and in deed, that he intends to rule as an authoritarian cult leader, ignore a 248-year-old Constitution, unmake the world that Americans fought and died to create, piss all over our dignity, and treat with pure contempt the liberal and democratic traditions that not only defined America, but made it the most powerful and prosperous country in human history.

My God, I don’t look forward to the coming years of worrying that Trump has the power to launch nuclear weapons whenever he pleases, or having to listen to all the stupid things he says and does, and having to think about Donald Trump, and the unending idiocy that comes out of his yap, every single day of my life until he dies.

How I longed for him to just fade away.

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I again have a sense of déja vu. This feels the way it always did—and does still—when Erdoğan wins. I wrote this in the wake of one such election:

… I wasn’t in Istanbul for the June 12 general election. So despite months of following the campaign in minute detail, when it actually happened, I was physically and metaphorically isolated from the mood in Turkey. There was some value to that: contemplating the pale, glassy, silent Baltic Sea puts Turkish hysteria in perspective.

And hysterical—and ugly—the election campaign was, marked by terrorist attacks, including one on the prime minister’s convoy; the release of sex tapes starring opposition leaders; blackmail; vulgar anti-Semitic rhetoric; insane conspiracy theory upon insane conspiracy theory; a scandal revealing the rigging of college entrance exams; the arrests of more military officers on charges of coup plotting (these arrests have been going on for years); threats by leading Kurdish politicians to set the country ablaze; serious efforts by Kurdish terrorists to do precisely that; growing Internet and press censorship; the last-minute discovery of 10 million new voters on the electoral rolls, only half of whom could even remotely be explained by Turkey’s changing demography; and noise, constant noise. It had become difficult even to imagine five minutes without the sound of loudspeakers blaring from campaign buses, or the prime minister’s bellowing voice, mute only for a few notable minutes when at one rally his teleprompter failed, leaving him staring speechless into the void.

Yet in the end, the Turkish people spoke. …

… In a gesture either lacking sensitivity to historic resonance or perfectly attuned to it, Prime Minister Erdoğa delivered a victory speech from the balcony of his headquarters in Ankara. His tone was magnanimous. “No one should doubt,” he said, “that we will protect the dignity, faith, and lifestyles of those who did not vote for us.” Shortly afterward, he offered to drop most of his libel suits against private individuals, politicians, and journalists who had insulted him.

To illustrate the mood among Turks who had prayed for his defeat, I quoted a a friend:

“To me, yesterday’s elections was not a matter of numbers in the parliament. To me, it showed that as a nation, we don’t have the capacity to choose right from wrong. … Turkey voted for a man whose minister talks of the “female” citizens as “a girl or a woman, whatever” meaning if she is a virgin or not (girl-woman difference, especially in Turkish), meaning if she is a prostitute. She is a “bitch” in the eyes of Erdoğan’s ministers because she speaks, she uses her right to express herself. People complain about using the most expensive fuel but still voted for this guy. …

This picture is to me darker than the number of seats. Because I believe numbers can change but only slightly unless the mentality changes which is impossible when the nation is too blind to see what is going on. … As a young woman in Turkey, I feel dead when I look at the big picture.

As of today, Turkey is more f*cked than ever. People who support freedom and rights or issues like education, we will be buried alive here. But who cares, we are dead already.

I see many Americans, on social media, echoing her sentiments now.

No, I wrote back to her.

You’re not dead yet. And since you’re alive, you’ll have to keep fighting. That’s the way it goes in a democracy, and at least Turkey is that, however compromised. It’s the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. That’s all the West ever promised you about it.

Would I have written that, I wonder, if I’d known that fourteen years later, Erdoğan would still be in power and the United States would reelect a politician whose outrages against decency, democratic norms, and the rule of law made Erdoğan look like a piker?

If this goes the way it went in Turkey—so far, nothing has suggested to me that this analogy is wrong—the Democrats are now a permanent minority party. Thus the biggest challenge to Trump, if there is one before he dies, may not come from the Democrats, but from within the GOP, just as the most serious challenge to Erdoğan came from the Gülenists:

… Initially, [Erdoğan] and the Gülen movement formed an alliance of convenience aimed at dislodging the old, Kemalist establishment in Turkey. But like any alliance of convenience, it reached its natural conclusion. Once the old guard was safely in prison or silenced for fear of arrest, Erdoğan and Gülen began to fight for ultimate control. What we’ve witnessed in the past few years has been a fight among the new, ostensibly pious ruling elites about how to divide the spoils of power. In recent years, the key power struggle in Turkey has not been between [Erdoğan] and the country’s secularists, but between Erdoğan and Gülen. The struggle hasn’t been about elections or democracy. Rather, it is a struggle for control of the Turkish state itself.

My brother suggested to me, the other night, that Elon Musk might play the role of Gülen. It took me a few seconds to get what he meant. But when I did, I realized he could well be right. Musk didn’t buy Twitter and finance Trump’s campaign for nothing. But there’s only room for one ego like that in American politics. I could easily imagine that after subduing the opposition, the two of them will begin fighting over the spoils.

This took years to play out in Turkey, though, and I see no reason to think it would happen overnight in America.

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Even though I knew, intellectually, that there was a fifty-fifty chance of this outcome, I still didn’t really allow myself to believe it. The result is shocking. And it is sad. What a stupid, stupid thing for us to have done, to ourselves and the world.

And it is frightening. I hope he doesn’t really intend to turn the Justice Department on his critics, but if he does, there are many people I’ll have to start worrying about, just as I worried about my friends in Turkey.

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Nothing lasts forever—not nations, not empires, not people, not Erdoğan, not even Donald Trump. We’re born, we live, we die, and new life comes into the world.

The end of the America I knew may look like disaster, but neither I nor anyone else can confidently rule out the possibility that one day, perhaps even soon, something better will be born.

Today, however, the only thing clear is that something has ended.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. 
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

20:48 EST

I’m getting too tired to write, but I can’t sleep. I should sleep, because this is the right stretch of time to sleep through, right? No need for the next seven hours to be an emotional rollercoaster when I could be unconscious. Except that I’m awake.

The initial results confirm that this is going to be unbearably close. (I let myself get too carried away with the Selzer poll.)

If you want to follow this the way I’m following it, join me in watching the Bulwark’s coverage:

This is going through my head:

In other news, Netanyahu sacked Gallant—the only Israeli official Washington trusts—sparking massive protests in Israel, and police in Germany have arrested eight people suspected of belonging to a far-right terror cell. They were, reportedly, planning an armed takeover in the east, where they intended to set up a new Nazi regime and carry out ethnic cleansing.

If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I managed to drift off.

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14:46 EST

We can cross this one off our bingo card

Polling sites have been receiving phony bomb threats, apparently from Russian domains. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far," the FBI said. At least two polling sites in Georgia were briefly evacuated.

What must it feel like to be Kamala Harris right now and to know that so much of the world is waiting, anxiously, for these results? That the fate and freedom of nations depends on her? I try to imagine it, but the idea is so foreign to anything I’ve ever experienced that I can’t.

I asked Bill Clinton that question, long ago. He was visiting Oxford during. the first year of his presidency and Americans were invited to Rhodes House to meet him. We all lined up excitedly. I must have been, what, twenty? When it was my turn to say hello and have my photo taken with the President, I gestured at the entourage—the Secret Service, the staff—and said, “What is this like?”

He did that thing Joe Klein described—he shook my hand while putting the other hand on my opposite elbow, while looking at me as if nothing he had ever seen or heard had ever so captured his attention. The effect of his charisma was precisely as everyone describes it: I was momentarily convinced that if it weren’t for all these bothersome security guards, he and I would just talk and talk about everything under the sun—foreign policy, how strange it was to wake up and realize that yes, you were the President of the United States, his memories of Oxford, our childhoods. Then a staffer broke us up, the spell broke, and he moved on to the next person in the line, who no doubt remembers him exactly as I do. It was eerie.

I didn’t speak to Hilary. All I remember was that she didn’t at all look like the woman she was reputed to be. She looked like someone’s mom. The mom who headed up the local Girl Scouts troop. She in fact looked exactly like someone who would bake cookies and stand by her man. I remember nothing else about her.

Anyway, Bill Clinton told me that yes, it’s absolutely as weird as you’d think it would be to wake up and realize that yes, you’re really the President—but he was getting a bit more used to it.

The pressure on Kamala Harris, though, vastly exceeds anything Clinton experienced. For one thing, if he’d lost either election, the country would have been in perfectly safe hands. It was a peaceful, optimistic moment. We’d won the Cold War. Presidents had time to make nostalgia trips back to Oxford. Even the Balkans hadn’t yet descended into madness; another great war in Europe, or even a small one, was truly unthinkable.

I can sort of imagine what it might have felt like to be Bill Clinton. Kamala Harris? I just can’t imagine it. Too much is riding on her. If you subjected me to even one percent of the stress she’s under, I’d melt like butter on a hot griddle.

---

Consider these two stories:

• Why the Pentagon just can’t quit Elon Musk. How Musk’s SpaceX became too big to fail for US national security.

• X is a white supremacist site:

  It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

  Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. … In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

  He notes that this bilge is making its way to Trump very quickly, as Rob Tracinski writes here:

Trump's Attack on Haitians Borrows From Neo-Nazis

It is insane that we’ve allowed our military to become completely dependent on a highly erratic private citizen who’s in bed with our adversaries and has turned Twitter into a neo-Nazi watering hole. It’s obscene that we’ve allowed him to try to buy this election, too.

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Is anyone else surprised that absolutely no one cares about the Jeffrey Epstein tapes?

UPDATE: Jimmy Kimmel is surprised, too.

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13:55 EST

From Vivek: “I just read this article and I’m compelled to ask: Have Americans truly lost their minds? Well and truly?

The Americans prepping for a Second Civil War. Many now believe that the U.S. could descend into political violence. Some are joining survivalist communities, canning food—and buying guns.

According to an analysis of FEMA data, some twenty million Americans are actively preparing for cataclysm—roughly twice as many as in 2017. Political violence, including the specter of civil war, is one of the reasons. A recent study conducted by researchers at UC Davis concluded that one in three adults in the US, including up to half of Republicans, feel that violence is “usually or always justified” to advance certain political objectives (say, returning Trump to the White House). In May, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, told the Financial Times that he believed there was about a thirty-five-per-cent chance of civil war breaking out in America. “We are now on the brink,” Dalio said, noting that a modern civil war—though it might not involve muskets—would see the fracturing of states and widespread defiance of federal law. In June, Dalio upped his estimate to “uncomfortably more than 50 percent,” predicting “an existential battle of the hard right against the hard left in which you will have to pick a side and fight for it, or keep your head down, or flee.” …

“My wife says my espresso is a religious experience,” Larry, the ranch’s assistant manager, told me, as we examined some coffee beans he’d stockpiled. “I’ve got enough dark roast here to keep us all going for six months at five cups a day.” Larry, who is sixty-nine, explained that his full-time job is with a “three-letter government agency” that deploys him to war zones. Like most Fortitude Ranchers, Larry could foresee society breaking down in a number of ways: a nuclear detonation, another pandemic, or rising political violence that could split the country into warring factions. He drew a crude map of the US on scrap paper. Two squiggly lines partitioned off the east, the west, and the middle. “I can see three different Americas,” he said. Miller had told me earlier that day that he thinks Texas, where he lives, will likely secede if Trump loses again. If Trump wins, states such as Oregon and Colorado could break apart along political lines. War might follow, even accidentally. “Maybe someone shoots Governor Abbott and then other nuts start shooting at Fort Hood,” Miller said. “The media misreports it and some militias form and fight. It would be irrational, but irrational wars are perfectly normal.”

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13:37 EST

I assume our readers, wherever they live, will be following the news from the United States very closely until a winner is declared, which means we could be waiting a good long time.

So this is the official Cosmopolitan Globalist Election Fandango, a place where we can all share news, thoughts, snippets of conversation overheard at the polling station, or anything else, related or unrelated, but good for distracting ourselves as we wait.

I’ll be updating this page continuously from now until it’s all over (though I’ll probably be asleep when the first results come in).

If you share an especially interesting thought or article in the comment section, I’ll copy it to the body of the post in the next update, so that everyone’s sure to see it.

Let the fandango begin.

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My prediction is that Kamala Harris will win. I say this based on the Selzer poll out of Iowa. But no result would surprise me—and I bet that when we know the outcome, it will seem, in retrospect, overdetermined.

Who do you think will win?

Does anyone suspect the polls have been wildly off?

It’s anyone’s guess when we’ll know the results. It could be days. But I predict Trump will declare victory before midnight. What about you?

It’s also anyone’s guess what kind of hellish surprise might be in store for us. Imagine how much fun you could have right now if you hate America and want to screw us up: cyber attacks, deep fakes, misinformation about voting, a nuclear first strike—the options are endless. And how many ways are there for us to screw things up unaided? Hanging chads, intimidation and violence at the polling sites, accusations of ballot stuffing, ballot stuffing, a technical screwup that forces recount after recount, a malfunction with the voting machines?

Would anything surprise you?

God forbid we screw it up so much that it ends up in the Supreme Court. That’s both completely unthinkable and entirely too likely. But the other perfectly plausible (and unthinkable) prospect is one or the other candidate winning the electoral college vote but not the popular vote. We’ve accepted that in the past without too much grumbling, but this time, I just don’t see the popular vote winners taking it on the chin and moving on.

We’re frayed to the limit.

You know, we should have got rid of the electoral college long ago. It’s absurd in the era of universal suffrage. But because that was such a daunting task, we didn’t—and now it’s a time bomb.

I know I have at least two readers who plan to leave the United States if Trump wins. These are serious plans, not the usual kind of promise we always hear from Brad Pitt. They’ve purchased property abroad. They’ve applied for jobs overseas. They’ve got put the whole thing in motion—they’re just waiting to see what happens. Are there more of you out there?

Maybe we’ll astonish ourselves, though, and despite everything, pull off a perfectly normal, peaceful, routine election. This would surprise me more than the any of the other possible scenarios, but we can’t rule it out. It is, after all, the way this is supposed to work, and the way it did work every four years since the American founding until Trump came along.

The New York Times is running a front-page story titled, How Americans Feel about the Election: Anxious and Scared:

… The nation enters this Election Day on edge over possibilities that once seemed unimaginable in 21st-century America: political violence, assassination attempts and vows of retribution against opponents. For many voters, the anxiety that pervaded the last election, a socially distanced race that happened amid the coronavirus outbreak, has morphed into a far grimmer feeling of foreboding. …

The FBI is investigating arson attacks last week of two ballot boxes, where incendiary devices marked with the message “Free Gaza” were found. Schools in Allentown, Pa., closed “out of an abundance of caution” when Mr. Trump held a rally there. In San Marcos, Texas, the police investigated reports of threatening fliers attached to Harris campaign signs, signed “Trump Klan.” And in Florida, outside an early voting site, an 18-year-old man supporting Mr. Trump brandished a machete at two older women backing Ms. Harris.

By Sunday, it felt as if the entire nation was girding for impact. Of what, exactly, no one seemed quite sure.

Poll workers are understandably anxious. “My fear is someone dropping by and shooting the whole place up,” says an election director in South Carolina named Laura Booth:

Weeks before the 2016 presidential election, a man stormed into Booth’s office and asked to file paperwork to run for president. She explained that the filing deadline had already passed. Then he pulled a knife from his pocket. “He just kept twirling it,” she remembers. “He didn’t hold it up to me, didn’t say I’m going to kill you. But the whole time he talked to me, he had a knife in his hand.” Her team called the police, who escorted the man out of the office and charged him with brandishing a weapon in a government building.

But Booth and her employees’ safety feels even more precarious in a presidential race marked by two assassination attempts on Donald Trump and escalating rhetoric against election workers. Almost 40 percent of election officials have reported experiencing threats, according to the Brennan Center. That harassment can run the gamut from angry voters hurling insults at county clerks in their neighborhood grocery store to coordinated “swatting” attacks that deploy armed law-enforcement officers to officials’ homes under false pretenses. One 2023 study by Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, a political-violence research hub, recounted officials receiving messages threatening to “shoot them or their homes, run them over, slit their throats” and “hang them from nooses.” Roudabeh Kishi, Bridging Divides’ chief research officer, says death threats are currently the most common event targeting election officials according to the nonprofit’s real-time data tracker.

… One Brennan Center study found that more than three in five election officials experiencing harassment have been threatened in person, vastly outpacing threats received via email, social media, and mail. Despite the severity of some of these threats, prosecutions remain relatively rare. “A lot of what we’re seeing is what we call lawful but awful,” Kishi says. “It’s awful, but isn’t necessarily illegal.” Issuing death threats is one thing, but hurling insults at election officials could be interpreted as free speech; the line isn’t always clear. Election deniers took advantage of that ambiguity during the 2022 midterm elections in South Carolina, when volunteers, egged on by the Republican candidate for secretary of state and local conservative organizations, flooded polling locations in Charleston County, determined to find proof of voter fraud. Isaac Cramer, who runs the county’s board of elections, spent the day fielding calls from panicked, mostly female poll workers who told him the aggressive voters shoved cameras in their faces and yelled at them that they were breaking the law. “Election Day for poll workers used to be about seeing your neighbors and friends,” Cramer says. “Now you look at somebody wrong and you’re accused of committing fraud.”

I used to work for Voter News Service, the exit polling consortium that called election results for all the major networks. (It was disbanded after that unfortunate business with Bush v. Gore. I had nothing to do with that.) My job was to find someone in every precinct in California to call us with the results. I found this kind of tedious, but I enlisted my brother to help me, and he got so into it that I pretty much turned the whole operation over to him. On election night, VNS rented a whole floor of the World Trade Center. We flew to Manhattan, where we took the calls from California together. VNS, and VNS alone, decided who won. It never even occurred to us that someone might try to threaten or intimidate us. Nor did we think to worry about terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center.

We certainly didn’t see news like this:

• The American Psychological Association's 2024 Stress in America survey reveals that 69 percent of adults cite the election as a significant source of stress, a notable increase from previous years. Chronic stress can lead to various health issues, including anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular problems. Therefore, adopting effective strategies to manage election-related stress and maintain overall well-being is crucial.

• Angry outbursts, a lack of motivation and poor eating habits may be signs of election stress that will put some people at higher risk for cardiovascular problems this week, experts and research suggest. Phoenix cardiologist Dr. Abed Asfour said he is prepared to see a rise in people seeking treatment for heart problems in the days following the election.

• More than 7 in 10 adults are worried the election results will lead to violence, and more 56 percent believe it could be the end of democracy in the US:

  Around 2 in 5 adults reported the state of the nation has made them consider moving to a different country (41 percent) and the political environment in their state has made them consider moving to a different state (39 percent). In addition, nearly two-thirds of adults (64 percent) felt as though their rights are under attack. A strong majority (82 percent) were worried that people may be basing their values and opinions on false or inaccurate information. Furthermore, around a third of adults (32 percent) reported the political climate has caused strain between them and their family members, and 3 in 10 said they limit their time with family because they don’t share the same values.

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Well, it’s awfully messed up, but I know how to fix everything. Just settle in and watch:

I could do it for hours. And I do.

Check back soon for updates. I’ll be here until I fall asleep in a few hours, and I’m sure I’ll wake up a few hours later to check the news.