OH NO NOT KENTUCKY NOOOOOO

Oliphantom Menace

It's like, on Oct 31, you eat candy and watch spooky movies. On the first Tuesday in November of an election year in the USA, you get absolutely kershnackered and watch the decline of the empire.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

"Oh, right, I forgot how absolutely ridiculous this system is."

Me, every four years, experiencing selective amnesia

Oliphantom Menace

Too early to say by so many factors, we need data, goddammit. Not enough data yet.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

yawn Trump is likely to get 230 electoral votes no matter what happens, based on electoral math.

No upsets yet, still no surprises. Louisiana is not a surprise.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

Drink number four is a beer, for those keeping score. At least, I'm pretty sure this is drink four. I'm resolving to pace myself a bit more from here, or else I'll be talking about Miyazaki films or why you shouldn't overuse adverbs when writing.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

With these early calls, I feel kind of like an enemy commander watching a charging enemy, like in LOTR or something, and I'm just crying out, "Steady!...." and the charging horde gets closer, and more red states fall to Trump the Despoiler and the electoral votes rise ever higher. "....HOOOOOLD!" I cry, and then there goes Texas with it's 40 electoral votes! Oh snap! It's getting closer.... "....HOLD!" I cry again, as 4 electoral votes from Nevada tick into the Trump column.

This is all as expected. Now is not the time to panic, now is not the time to react. Stare at them with all your fury, knowing the moment approaches, the deciding battle, contact has not yet been made, true blood has not yet been spilt.

But I'd rather be us than them tonight.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

Okay, that was probably cringe, but it's not like I'm saving bytes tonight.

Oliphantom Menace

pokes the data C'mon.

Oliphantom Menace

This is the part of the evening where some of you might be saying to yourselves, "I realize Mississippi is a horrible place that no one should live, but did they pay zero attention to all the overt Nazi shit?" and my painful realization after many years of denial is in fact, Yes, they did see all the Nazi shit. And the nicest thing I can say about that is that for some reason the Nazi shit wasn't a dealbreaker.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

It was probably Harris' laugh that did it.

I mean one guy wears an adult diaper, but have you heard her laugh?

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

12 a.m. ET is when the fun of election night really begins. Lots of Trump voters going to sleep, thinking things are great, waking up in the morning like "WHAT THE FUCK"

.... or else that's when we're gonna know if we're in real fuckin' trouble.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

"How the electoral college works"

It mostly doesn't, but that's for another day.

Oliphantom Menace

From CNN:

Magic Wall analysis: Georgia in 2020 and now
From CNN's Jack Forrest
With former President Donald Trump currently leading in Georgia as of 10 p.m. ET with 51.8% of the vote to Vice President Kamala Harris’ 47.2%, with 81% of votes counted, there could be a slow shift blue over the course of the night and morning if 2020 serves as any indication, according to an on-air analysis from CNN’s John King.
In 2020, at 9 p.m. ET on election night in Georgia, Trump led by just over 240,000 votes and more than 15 points. By 12:00 a.m. Wednesday, Trump was still up by nearly 10 points. But 12 hours later, at noon that same day, Biden began chipping away at Trump’s lead as the state counted mail-in ballots, with the Republican nominee leading by just over 2 points.
By Friday, Biden had taken a razor-thin lead of only a couple thousand votes, which grew slightly to .1 point when the race was called for Biden on Saturday. After a final count, Biden had won the state by 11,779 votes and .3 points.
That does not mean Harris will take Georgia, King said, but “it just means that she can. It means that there’s still math out there to do it.”
King also pointed out that votes will be counted quicker this year than four years ago.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

In case for some reason you're seeing early returns in Minnesota, don't be too worried about it.

It takes forever for Minnesota to tally up votes, it seems, and like every other state, the urban votes tend to come in last.

In 2016 it took a few days for us to determine the winner, Clinton ended up winning by only 10k votes.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

What is a red mirage? Is it happening now?

It’s important to wait until all ballots are counted because the swing states tend to sway both ways throughout the day.

WRIC ABC 8News (www.wric.com)

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

Unless there's some magical change in the fundamentals of the 2020 election, it's going to look really bad for us until about midnight (my time), and then at about 90-95% of precincts reporting, we're going to keep adding lopsided vote totals to Harris, with the current number representing Trump's floor.

I am not convinced it's over yet, no matter what the AP or zeitgeist says.

Either way, time for another drink.

#uspol

Oliphantom Menace

North Carolina isn't really that much of a surprise.

I think NC hasn't voted for a Democrat for President since 2008.

Oliphantom Menace

It literally always feels like this, every time. Entirely too close. Watching grim numbers that terrify you, and you think to yourself, "How can so many people vote for this ridiculous asshole", but when it goes well you slowly get to see the results reverse--as city dwellers collectively tell all the rural (mostly white) voters--"Um, nope. We're not going to do that."

And then...sometimes that doesn't happen, and that really sucks.

But they haven't called anything yet that is really unexpected. I haven't "looked at the remaining numbers" much, but there are large precincts that haven't reported across the 'blue wall' not to mention AZ and NV (and the former, at least, still has people waiting in line to vote, right?) so I dunno.

We'll just see where we are in a few hours, like I said earlier, this is where it gets truly interesting. We're at the point where there haven't really been any big surprises, and all the same states that were foretold to be crucial to deciding the outcome are--low and behold, like science--in fact the same ones crucial to determining the outcome.

And once again, we're waiting for large population areas to report their votes last, it always takes the most time (unless we solved that problem across multiple states since 2020 somehow) and it can shift the narrative dramatically.

This is literally why I told you repeatedly you can't send a "message" with a vote. That's not what a vote is.

The "message" is determined retroactively, after the fact, after this is all over and the outcome is determined. Many people, in fact, have jobs in which this is their entire responsibility: to craft the message of what the election meant, and why the people voted the way they voted, and why so-and-so won or so-and-so lost.

But we're still, at this point, more or less exactly where the 270 to win map predicted we'd be, with the same 'swing states' determining the outcome, waiting for votes to come in, to truly discover what kind of country it's going to be for the next years.

It fucking sucks.

#uspol

DeepSpace🔺9

@oliphant

Trump has 230 electoral votes right now. He needs 237 votes to take it away. Unless things change dramatically, Trump will win the election with both the electoral and the popular vote. The New York Times has already called it for Trump. They say he’s 85% likely to win. They had it at 91% but dropped it down when fresh numbers came in. It’s not over until it’s over. But brace yourself for the worst.

Oliphantom Menace

@mishi He needs 270, not 237.