Thoughts On Election Day, Part 1

Maybe the most dispiriting thing about what happened on Election Day is the rightward shift.  Yes, people are saying Trump is going to lose.  But the Senate was supposed to flip to the Democrats, and as it looks right now, those dirty Republicans will hold a 50-48 lead and the Democrats will have a pair of runoffs for both Senate seats in Georgia in January to pull off a tie.  Not going to happen.

Cory Gardner in Colorado and Martha McSally in Arizona were slated to be routed, and they were.  But closer races tipping blue did not come through.  Thom Tillis won in North Carolina.  Joni Ernst -- puke -- won in Iowa.  Susan Collins, of all fucking people, won in Maine.  And meanwhile, Doug Jones, a man who convicted the white supremacist who killed those four Black girls at a church, was defeated by Tommy Tuberville, the former Head Coach at Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati.  Seriously, Alabama?

Meanwhile, although the House remains in Democratic hands, they are losing seats.  This after an early projection by FiveThirtyEight (which along with Wonkette were the sites I reloaded constantly throughout Election Night because I couldn't bear to watch coverage on the television) that the Dems were going to gain seats.  The blue wave that crashed in 2018 was largely swept out to sea in 2020.

So that means that even if Biden wins the presidency, he won't be able to do jack shit because the Senate will be controlled by Republicans, and Bitch McConnell will do his goddamndest to cripple his earnest attempts to, you know, govern What Once Was The Greatest Country In The World.  A few pundits event think moderate Democrats might rebel in the House, leaving Biden no help from Congress.  Great, just what we need: More fucking gridlock.

The only explanation I can come up with is vote-splitting.  Hopefully someone tabulates the number of votes for President by party and then the combined votes for all Senators and Representatives by party.  Maybe one would assume the numbers for all offices by party would roughly be equal, but if the dirty Republicans had such a good night while Trump is in danger of being thrown out of office, that can't be true.  So, why the vote-splitting?  Apparently there was a minority of Republicans who want this country to stay red and regressive, but just couldn't bear to vote for a lazy, stupid, corrupt asshole.  That brings me no joy.  People can think that Trump is separate from Republicans (you should see some Republican politicians and pundits actually admonishing Trump after he began going off on suing states to stop voting -- you calculating fuckheads), but the Republican Party has been an evil, rotten group of people way before Trump.  He was just the dumbshit who says all the hateful things out loud, and the prick who gave Republicans final permission to be pricks themselves.  That proud and narcissistic lack of self-awareness is what the Republican Party is now, vote-splitters be damned.

One other thing: The polls were wrong and should be taken out to the woods to be shot.  This is the second presidential election where the odds were leaning leftward, only be jerked cruelly to the right once actual votes were counted.  My explanation: There is a secret cabal of Republican Americans that are not "shy" about voting for Trump, as some experts believe, but are, frankly, assholes who don't want to talk to anyone about how they feel about their politicians.  That reminds me of Trump's, and Republicans', war on The Media.  That war has extended to another industry that is also curious as to the thoughts of the general public.  That is not the fault of poll experts.  But they cannot do their jobs if people decided they aren't going to be forthright with them.  Because then you have stunning, demoralizing blindsides like what we on the left have suffered through since Tuesday.