DC: Decriminalized mushrooms.
FL: $15 minimum wage.



I changed the channel and feel less bad.
270 to win.billy.pilgrim wrote: ↑Wed Nov 04, 2020 12:06 amI changed the channel and feel less bad.
Edit: even slightly encouraged
Atlanta, Philly and Milwaukee could give Biden 288.
Re-edit: Florida goes trump by 350,000 votes. DeSantis disenfranchised 1.2 million potential voters.
November 3, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
Tonight, we wait, as returns from this year’s election are about what we expected. In-person ballots cast today are weighted toward Trump, while the uncounted mail-in and early ballots are expected to favor Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Tonight, few states except the rock-solid Democratic or Republican states have yet been called by the Associated Press.
This is the scenario we all foresaw. Tonight, the election returns look relatively good for Trump, which is why he talked about claiming a victory at the end of election night. This is the so-called “red mirage.” But as the mail-in ballots get counted, everyone expects the Democratic numbers to climb fast and far.
As they do, the Trump team will fight every single ballot. They will try to claim that counting the mail-in ballots is “fraud,” or that Democrats are “stealing” the election when, in fact, election officials are simply counting all the ballots.
Remember that no one is arguing that Trump will win the popular vote. He wants to win in the Electoral College.
What we are seeing in this election is the result of voter suppression across the southern states, along with an Electoral College that has been corrupted from its original intent and is now artificially skewed toward rural states.
In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.
Today, as well, there are problems with ballots. This summer, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major fundraiser for the Republican Party and a key ally of Trump, changed the rules for mail delivery, slowing it significantly. It turns out that more than 300,000 ballots were checked into the USPS mail system but not checked out of it. U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the USPS to sweep 27 processing centers for the missing ballots, but USPS officials refused, saying they already had a system in place and that changing it would be disruptive. Sullivan has called the parties in tomorrow morning to discuss the issue.
The problem of voter suppression is compounded by the misuse of the Electoral College. The Framers originally designed delegates to the Electoral College to vote according to districts within states, so that states would split their electoral votes, making them roughly proportional to a candidate’s support. That system changed in 1800, after Thomas Jefferson recognized that he would have a better chance of winning the presidency if the delegates of his own home state, Virginia, voted as a bloc rather than by district. He convinced them to do it. Quickly, other state officials recognized that the “winner-take-all” system meant they must do the same or their own preferred candidate would never win. Thus, our non-proportional system was born, and it so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted constitutional amendments to switch the system back.
Democracy took another hit from that system in 1929. The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.
These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.
We should know the results of this election by Thursday night, I would guess.
Biden is still projected to win.
Feeling a little better as the night has worn on, sleep was a little elusive. It'll be a skin of the teeth victory if it happens, but expect massive legal challenges (probably unsuccessful) as well as the usual PINO screaming.
Let it sink in how close this election is. I could maybe (big maybe) understand Trump winning in 2016. But we've had four years of this guy saying nonsense, being incompetent, and being overtly divisive and nasty. It's very telling about the character of the American people that so many still support him and see all he says and does and think "that's the man I want representing us".
Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external "evil."
Pretty much an academic version of neoplacebo's description of the crybaby cult.Whack9 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 04, 2020 7:47 amLet it sink in how close this election is. I could maybe (big maybe) understand Trump winning in 2016. But we've had four years of this guy saying nonsense, being incompetent, and being overtly divisive and nasty. It's very telling about the character of the American people that so many still support him and see all he says and does and think "that's the man I want representing us".
I think the fundamental character of America is one of ressentimemt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment
Why is Trump so popular despite his overall shittiness? Well, I think this describes it to a T (heh) -Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external "evil."
https://er.ncsbe.gov/?election_dt=11/03 ... &contest=0
US PRESIDENT
Precincts Reported: 2662 of 2662
Donald J. Trump REP 2,732,084 49.98%
Joseph R. Biden DEM 2,655,383 48.57%
Jo Jorgensen LIB 47,215 0.86%
Write-In (Miscellaneous) 12,940 0.24%
Howie Hawkins GRE 11,825 0.22%
Don Blankenship CST 7,381 0.14%
So close, crap. I doubt there are 77K provisional ballots that all break Joe's way to be counted.
US SENATE
Precincts Reported: 2662 of 2662
Thom Tillis REP 2,640,379 48.73%
Cal Cunningham DEM 2,543,672 46.94%
Shannon W. Bray LIB 167,968 3.10%
Kevin E. Hayes CST 66,668 1.23%
Thom Cock beat Cal's dick.
US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES DISTRICT 11
Precincts Reported: 304 of 304
Madison Cawthorn REP 243,898 54.52%
Moe Davis DEM 189,516 42.36%
Tracey DeBruhl LIB 8,565 1.91%
Tamara Zwinak GRE 5,417 1.21%
Not even close. I gotta get outta here.
Overall, 8-5 in the NC US House for the Repugs, which I think is an improvement for the Dems thanks to the courts' rulings on gerrymandering.
NC ATTORNEY GENERAL
Precincts Reported: 2662 of 2662
Josh Stein DEM 2,684,854 50.10%
Jim O'Neill REP 2,674,085 49.90%
Recount?
The rest of the Council of State are sooo close, mostly Repug.
https://er.ncsbe.gov/?election_dt=11/03 ... &contest=0
The NC SUPREME COURT and NC COURT OF APPEALS races all went to the Repugs, all close, some perhaps by recountable margins.
https://er.ncsbe.gov/?election_dt=11/03 ... &contest=0
Shit!
Henderson County sucks, pretty much 60-40 for the Repugs in every race.
https://er.ncsbe.gov/?election_dt=11/03 ... &contest=0
My math must be busted, because I'm getting Biden with 270 if he wins Michigan, assuming he wins Wisconsin and Nevada? If Trump wins the remainder, he gets 268?billy.pilgrim wrote: ↑Wed Nov 04, 2020 9:21 amI'm seeing 269 to 269 if Biden gets either Michigan or Georgia.
Trump wins the tie in the House.
DeSantis gave trump 29 votes, but Biden made little effort to win Florida
I agree with you.
I accidentally had Maine as trumpWhack9 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 04, 2020 9:25 amMy math must be busted, because I'm getting Biden with 270 if he wins Michigan, assuming he wins Wisconsin and Nevada? If Trump wins the remainder, he gets 268?billy.pilgrim wrote: ↑Wed Nov 04, 2020 9:21 amI'm seeing 269 to 269 if Biden gets either Michigan or Georgia.
Trump wins the tie in the House.
DeSantis gave trump 29 votes, but Biden made little effort to win Florida
Dems head toward House control, but lose incumbents to GOP
Democrats drove Wednesday toward extending their control of the House for two more years but with a potentially shrunken majority as they lost at least six incumbents and failed to oust any Republican lawmakers in initial returns.
By 4 a.m. EST, Democrats' only gains were two North Carolina seats vacated by GOP incumbents after a court-ordered remapping made the districts more Democratic.
Good riddance, DINO.Though they seemed likely to retain House control, their performance was an unexpected disappointment for the party, which hoped for modest gains of perhaps 15 seats.
After decades of trying, Republicans defeated 15-term Rep. Collin Peterson from a rural Minnesota district that backed President Donald Trump in 2016 by 31 percentage points, Trump's biggest margin in any Democratic-held district. Peterson, who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, opposed Trump's impeachment and is one of the House's most conservative Democrats. He was defeated by Republican Michelle Fischbach, the former lieutenant governor.
Also losing were freshmen Democrats Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, health secretary under President Bill Clinton, in adjacent South Florida districts where Trump seemed to consolidate support among Cuban voters. Others defeated were Democratic freshmen Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico and Kendra Horn in Oklahoma, who had surprising victories in 2018 in districts Trump carried decisively in 2016....
Maine at large, 2 EVs, and Maine 1, 1 EV, went for Joe.