This is not normal, and I hate it.
I woke up this morning with a sense of dread, and glanced at the news only briefly. I have been conditioned to expect the worst the day after an election, when I will learn just how stupid and hateful my fellow citizens are, when I will discover that the shrieking losers will march their case to the corrupt Supreme Court to get their election overturned, when the newspapers and fucking 538 will babble excuses about how their efforts to manipulate, that is, “predict” the elections went awry, and we’ll see how much democracy has decayed. There is never any good news but that it is tainted with bad.
So I glanced. Then I closed the news and ran away.
What little I learned: ballots aren’t all counted yet, lots of elections are still up in the air. The “red wave” that esteemed newspapers like the NY Times never materialized — but then, I’ve learned that the media desperately wants a “wave”, and they never happen. We don’t know the final outcome yet, but the newspapers are still yapping about it. I can’t even imagine what the noise on cable news is like, and I’m not going to try to find out.
So my current assessment is short: not as bad as it could have been, not as good as it should have been. Give it a few days.
What else can you expect when your choices are “bad” and “worse”?
I simply remember Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline DEWEY WINS!
While laughing.
Enough said about exit polls. What counts is as PZ said, the ballot count.
The ‘Post had an editorial yesterday asking for the “Election Night” bruhaha to come to an end. This endless ‘race’ coverage, where it looks like Republicans are sweeping until the more left-leaning cities and suburbs can finally turn in their thousands more votes, is what opened up TFG to making the ‘stolen’ claim.
I’m not buying it. He was going to claim it was stolen if he lost regardless of election night coverage. He said as much. He didn’t think he could lose fairly.
Cable news coverage is disastrous. I could only take about thirty seconds.
I stopped paying too much attention to the polls after the last few election cycles.
Because the polls stopped being accurate and reliable.
A lot of the polls are push polls, meaning they are propaganda.
They aren’t made to be accurate, they are slanted to make people think candidate X is ahead and so you should vote for them or stay home.
Plus, a huge number of people no longer will answer polls. I got calls for at least two and wouldn’t talk to them. Some of them are Fake and ask questions like, “since Biden is a commie born in Kenya, so why are you voting for him”
Re: Walter Solomon @ #4…
Your last 4 words are unneeded.
Re: raven @ #6…
I quit answering polls decades ago.
One thing that I saw pointed out on Sunday: no matter how much the media and pundits talked about a “red wave,” actual Republican lawmakers like Moscow Mitch were not behaving as if they thought it was realistic.
After ignoring the news all last night, I’m still processing the results. All in all, it seems like it was, at best, a draw.
And who is Tim Michels?
Tim Michels was going to turn Wisconsin into a one party state.
He doesn’t say how he will make sure the GOP never loses another election though.
I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with ethnic cleansing or inviting Russia to set up their electoral system in Wisconsin.
Or does it?
It wasn’t even that close considering it’s Wisconsin.
The governor’s race in Blue Oregon is closer.
Raven @10: That’s only because conservatives stuck a third-party spoiler candidate in to siphon off Democrats’ votes. Republican psycho Christine Drazen would never have stood a chance on her own, so Phil Knight and other big business groups spent a bunch of money propping up ex-Democrat Betsy Davis to make her look like a valid alternative to Democrat Tina Kotek.
In my neck of the woods, this is a bigger victory than 2020. Celebrate, people!
whheydt @7
Agreed. His entire term could be summed with the first three words of the sentence.
@ 10
I was looking over the numbers and I couldn’t figure out why Evers won, but Mandela Barnes didn’t. Barnes got 1,307,282 votes and Ron Johnson received 1,334,680. Meanwhile, Tony Evers got 1,355,409 votes to Tim Michels 1,266,126. Evidently 48.127 Evers voted didn’t also vote for Barnes, but the difference between Johnson/Michels voters was 68,554.
Make of that what you will.
Meanwhile in Georgia:
Raphael Warnock got 1,941,473 votes, and Herschel Walker revived 1,906,229. (Yeah, I know: “How is it even close?” Forget it, Jake. It’s Georgia.) In the governor’s race Brian Kemp beat Stacy Abrams (again) 2,109,088 to 1,809,496. There were 131,977 Warnock voters who didn’t vote from Abrams, while 202,859 Kemp voters didn’t vote for the brain dead jock.
I have heard it said by the news analysts that “the voters” seem to like divided government . I do not know about that for sure another way to look at it is the country has not come to any kind of consensus yet and is not very sure of which one of the political parties is on their side.
What these election results are showing me is the political campaigns will continue there will be little getting back to “normal” better then guns at the least but it does prevent doing much about the important things just more slogging and struggle
DeSantis prevented the voting in Florida from being monitored. He then won in a landslide, by far more than predicted, including in counties where he would be predicted to do poorly. Why is no one talking about this, at least in the mainstream media?
I don’t understand the remark about 538. The results seem pretty much in line with 538’s predictions, and I don’t understand how those predictions would even work as an attempt at manipulation (nor what they would be trying to do as an attempt at manipulation). What am I missing?
Well in NYS we got Hochul as governor. Zeldin would have been a nightmare for young women. And he was “ tough on crime “ aka a fascist. I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with this anymore.
No huge surprises here in MN. The good news is that we had a blue wave, and now our Dem Governor has a Dem majority in both the House and Senate.
I expect they will be codifying the right to an abortion into MN law as the first order of business.
Sorry about Emmer. It was close and he is only elected due to the gerrymandering, which is something we can now work on fixing.
Here in MI, we have an unusual feature of our constitution that allows amendment by citizen ballot initiative. In 2018, we passed an amendment granting sole redistricting authority to a citizens commission, and another mandating other election reforms, like no-excuse absentee voting. A derivative outcome was Biden carrying Michigan in 2020 by a comfortable margin, and in 2022, flipping both legislative houses to majority democrat, as well as the state’s congressional delegation. Also, by that same initiative process, we further expanded voting rights, required elected officials to disclose contributions and gifts, and enshrined reproductive rights in the constitution. It’s amazing what the people can accomplish when they actually use the power available to them.