And each time, the mess gets bigger.
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Here is the mood from 4 years ago:
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Huge mandates I’m getting, biggest ever in history. Even though the other side was cheating, so much cheating!
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If you’re into tragedy ameliorating (some might say palliative) numbers, here’s a fair on-going summary which yet isn’t as good as our homespun @DukeTrout (bless 'im!):
Election Results Update, Day 10
Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 1:12:50a PST
Source: nbcnews.com
10 days out from the election and results are still trickling in, with an estimated 2.6 million votes yet to be counted at this point — mostly from the following states: CA 833k, NJ 306k, IL 302k, OH 196k, WA 166k, MD 118k, NY 112k, MA 96k, CO 79k, OR 42k, MN 39k, AZ 37k, PA 36k, TX 36k, MS 33k, AR 30k, NC 22k.
With Trump’s total now up to 76,453,640 vs Harris’s 73,755,129, Trump’s supposed mandate has now shrunk to a margin of just 2.7 million and 1.8% (50.0% vs 48.2%) — smaller than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over Trump in 2016 of 2.9 million and 2.1%, and much smaller than Biden’s 7.1 million and 4.5% margin in 2020.
…
Note that in several of the swing states, Harris is actually getting more votes than Biden got in 2020, which reflects the positive impact of her campaign there — even if Trump managed to get considerably more than in 2020. Note also that Trump did not end up improving on his 2020 vote totals everywhere, in 10 states he actually lost votes from 2020, though not nearly as many as Harris ended up losing from Biden’s 2020 totals.
In anycase if ever you read “landslide” in association with trump’s victory (and i have) attempt some sort of comment in disgust; as nothing of the sort occurred!
(parasitic Pollyanna entity sez: if you re-ran this miserable election by say… March 2025, it wouldn’t surprise if the narrow margins fell again against the incumbent -sigh-)
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If only… 
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gormless recommendation of an interesting article about the ‘nigh infallible’ political soothsayer Allan Lichtman and his explanation of why he got it (so) wrong this time. (and he even includes a dig at Merrick Garland whom he “loves” but let this happen …uh, yeah -sigh-) TL;DR: he says the environment of misinformation/misinformed (voter) has never been worse. (…uh, yeah -sigh-)
The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?
Allan Lichtman’s forecast model was meant to be foolproof. He explains to David Smith what was different this time
David Smith in Washington
Sat 16 Nov 2024 11.00 EST
Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.
Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.
…
“I love the guy [Garland],” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”
Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do. …
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For the record Nostradamus was a shitty prognosticator too. None of his predictions were remotely useful or even accurate except through the kind of creative interpretation possible through hindsight.
But Nostradamus is actually a pretty good analogy because all these so-called genius political forecasters still manage to coast on unearned reputations and occasional dumb luck no matter how many times they get something wrong. Four years from now all their confident-but-wrong predictions will be forgotten and they’ll be back on TV doing the same thing.
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Best joke cabinet pick so far…folks are recommending Audrey Marie Schneider of Houston as Transportation Secretary. 
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This is the best news I’ve seen in a couple of weeks. I forwarded it to some friends.
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Of the various (numerous) conservative editorialists at the NYT, David French seems at times to be the most thoughtful - the most likely to try other than just rattling off republican talking points (e.g. Douthat, Stevens). Today he raises one factor which, while rather obvious, hasn’t appeared in this form in the “the democrats done it!” melted down media: Presidential voters can be divided into two groups, those who are paying attention and read stuff (which French calls “activists”), and those who passively accept their immediate media environment and vote their narrow self interest and quickly retire to their couches (which French calls “the majority”). Some of us, in the doldrums of despair, tend to characterize the latter as mixture of selfish low information racists and misogynists; but I suppose “the majority” also serves -sigh-
Here’s a ~link to the David French article “Donald Trump Is Already Starting to Fail” It actually comes off as rather optimistic for us lefties …well, a bit.
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Here’s fodder for part-time conspiracy theorists: If putin were permitted to make trump cabinet appointments, would he have done (much) differently than the current rogues’ gallery?
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The quote skeet:
A Trump supporting, anti-trans, anti-gay Republican was elected commissioner of the county where I grew up. He won despite being in jail on election night for a sexual assault in Vegas.
It’s now come out that the woman he assaulted was his daughter.
Hancock County Commissioner John Jessup guilty plea in Las Vegas sex. assault case
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I guess all the tough talk about executing pedos doesn’t refer to their own pedos.
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They’re just looking for an excuse to kill Democrats…
Apparantly, I’ve talked to you too much, cause the system is yelling at me and telling me to send you a PM instead!
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You know how they feel about “evidence” and “facts.” The more evidence there is against someone, the more innocent they are. The only facts are those that are unproven.
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https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5000006-speaker-johnson-transgender-bathroom-policy/
As expected, he’s nothing but spite.
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I’ll never understand this recent incessant need to govern bathrooms.
Without question, they have been in a bathroom before with someone whose underwear contents differed from theirs and they were blissfully unaware as they stared into space and tinkled.
All he had to do was nothing. Pretend it was like his normal governing job.
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