by A man by the name of Larry Sabato, who has followed US elections for six decades, said yesterday that he can never remember the sense of foreboding that there is now. I believe that. People are scared this time around. I’m scared. Will democracy itself even survive another Trump win? Could there be a civil war? How many lives will a Trump win cost? The stakes are enormous. (They’ve been enormous before, even if we didn’t know it at the time. For instance, my brother would probably never have ended up in Basra if Al Gore had won in 2000. But now the stakes are huge and we know it.) It’s no surprise that turnout is through the roof. In some states including Texas, more people have voted before election day than they did last time including election day.
Fivethirtyeight are still giving Trump a one-in-ten chance. But that doesn’t account for blatant cheating, or close races decided (probably in Trump’s favour) by the Supreme Court. There’s even a faint possibility of an electoral college tie, which (if I understand the rules correctly) would also likely go to Trump. Add in these unknowables and you might end up at something more like one in seven, which isn’t all that unlikely. Were you born on a Wednesday?
Pennsylvania looks like being the key. If Biden hangs on to the states Hillary Clinton won, and also wins Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (Trump won all three of these by less than one point in 2016), he wins the election. Biden is up big in the polls in Michigan and Wisconsin, but Pennsylvania is somewhat tighter. If he loses Pennsylvania, then he still has a shot (there’s Arizona and Georgia and so on), but if he’s doing worse than expected in one state, the same is probably true elsewhere, and the rest of the dominoes are likely to fall as well. It should be said that if Trump does win, he’ll probably have done so while losing the popular vote once again. Trump is really unlikely to actually get more votes than Biden. What a crap system.
Tonight’s lesson wasn’t going well at all for a while until we started to use a textbook and my student told me she’d studied in France on the Erasmus programme, just like I had done ages earlier. (She lived in Montpellier in 2015; I lived in Lyon in 2000-01.) Before that I saw the guy who until last week wanted to study in Amsterdam but has suddenly decided it would be way too expensive and wants instead to go to Aarhus in Denmark. (I always thought Aarhus was in the middle of our street.)
I’ve just heard a loud bang. A car has hit a bike. The cyclist is fine. Maybe that’s an omen for tomorrow.
