I have followed FiveThirtyEight from time to time, but maybe I shouldn't have. Partly it's because site founder Nate Silver has exposed himself as a libertarian/Peter Thiel whore. Partly it's also because the news it's been giving me since the summer aren't favorable enough for me. But on that thread, the recent a-ha moment I learned from reading journalism has lifted my guilt for no longer going on that website only because it makes me feel depressed. Republican pollsters have, especially recently, flooded the ... I guess zeitgeist with polls saying Republicans are riding a red wave and will win Congress and shit. FiveThirtyEight aggregates those polls into comprehensive, this-party-is-favored-to-win-by-this-margin, cut-and-dried odds. The trendline has steered right in a big way; Silver now says that Republicans will take back the House and there's a pretty good chance they'll take back the Senate. But that's with these shady Republican polls skewing the average. That's done because Republicans are now playing mind games with both The Media and the electorate. If they are able to influence the pre-election message that things are breaking Republicans' way, and then the votes say that Democrats won, that only boosts the narrative (the seeds of which have also already been planted by Republicans) that Democrats are cheating. Conversely -- and this line of thought should get more pull than it is -- if it turns out that Republicans "win," they can say that the "honest" pollsters predicted as such, and so they can say that despite Democratic ratfucking (a total bullshit lie), The American People overcame that and spoke in unison that they want fascism. Incredibly complex, incredibly underhanded, and incredibly frightening.
FiveThirtyEight has been wrong before. Yes, it gave a puncher's chance of Trump "winning" in 2016, but it was getting only faint whispers of what was going on in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In no way did it (or could it) calculate him and Republicans illegally asking Russia to spread disinformation in order to brainwash voters into helping him win. And there was no systemic, party-wide polling conspiracy trying to muddy the waters so that their narrative could either be justified tonight or be used as a rallying cry to fight cheating that never occurred. I'm hoping the site is wrong again. But I'm now scared of it. I regularly use the News app on my phone, and about a few weeks ago it began displaying the odds of which party will win the House and Senate on its splash page. That is giving FiveThirtyEight a lot of power. Should it be given that power when people who are paying attention have noticed that's being manipulated? And what about Silver? He has to know that Republicans are fucking with him like this. But he's a libertarian, and his odds are skewing the way Republicans want it to be skewed. Does he care? Or he is just going to say he only deals with "the numbers," when the political and psycho-social context are really the main story as to how Americans are voting the way they are voting?
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I don't care what people think -- this is the truth. If Democrats win (and by win I mean they get anything important, be it a governor's race or one of the two chambers of Congress, what have you), they won fair and square. If Republicans "win," they cheated. That is the truth. There is no Both Sides Do It. Republicans cheat, Democrats don't. And so if a Republican comes out on top on any individual race, I will immediately believe that person won because of voter suppression, or fucking with the ballot box or the polling site or voting hours or initial invalidation of votes by some county-level hack. As races drag on beyond Election Day, I'll figure Republican judges are helping Republicans win. (Oh, don't forget gerrymandering. That's why Republicans likely will win the House. That bullshit fix was in back in 2020.)
There are conspiracy theories; you just have to believe in the real ones. And the real conspiracy is that Republicans (not just Trump; they're allies when it comes to upending democracy) have successfully built a terrifying apparatus where they will claim any political race and pull out all the stops in order to keep it. Republicans claim Democrats are already cheating, will cheat today, and will cheat tomorrow. That's just projection. Republicans do what they say Democrats do. It's a goddamn psychosis, and it's a spell they've been under since the run-up to the 2016 election. Some Russian just admitted it, for fuck's sake. I know in my bones that if people investigate enough, it will be proven that the Trump campaign asked the Russian government for help in winning 2016 in exchange for something of value Vladimir Putin wanted. Ever since Republicans shut up and went along for a ride that delivered them the Supreme Court, they haven't been able to get the taste of power out of their fuckin' mouths. And so they believe in The Big Lie, and they'll suck Trump's dick whenever he demands they go down on him, and they'll copy his Neanderthal, Mafia-style tactics in order to take or retain power.
I hope correct-minded people can see through this. And I hope enough people care enough to vote and stop this march to dictatorship. But will they be disillusioned by inflation and this phantom idea that crime is running rampant in our streets? Will they not believe these lies, but not care enough to vote because Both Sides Do It? Or will they understand that the United States is sliding towards fascism ... and will vote for it because they believe that Republicans will magically lower gas prices? I'm afraid the answers to all of the above are "yes."
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I remember being at Herkimers bar in 2016, ready to see Hillary Clinton elected. It was not going the way it was supposed to go. Then I saw one brainwashed state -- I think it was North Carolina -- went red, and I went home and drank the rest of this bottle of shoju I was given.
I was at Bauhaus in 2018 when Democrats took back the House. I was more relieved than happy. But I don't think I can stomach going to an Election Night party tonight because I'm scared of what could happen. Instead, I think I will do a combination of working late, watching Black Adam, going to a concert, and/or huddling in a coffeeshop and doing non-Election Day shit to distract myself. Regardless of what I do in the evening, once I go home, I will pour myself a cocktail and hopefully drift off to sleep, then wake up to whatever fucking fresh hell awaits me Wednesday morning.
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