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DAY 1387

11/7/2020

TRUMP VANQUISHED
THOUGHTS ON A DAY OF MIRACLES

“ONE THING IS CLEAR,” I said to Mr. O.
   “What’s that?” the profoundly politically advanced opossum giggled.
   “No matter what we say today, it cannot adequately capture the joy and importance of the moment,” I said. “Lots of people are going be able to describe it more eloquently, more profoundly, with greater depth.”
   “Ha, ha, ha,” Mr. O said, “Phoebe, you are such a laugh riot.”
   Demonstrating that, even on a day of great miracles, there are always more surprises. Who could have predicted that a marsupial could giggle and laugh?
   Sobering up for a moment, Mr. O said:
   “It’s still hard to believe that Joe Biden has beaten Donald Trump.”
   “And hard not to sit here and bawl my eyes out,” I said.
   “I know, ladies are so emotional,” Mr. O sniffed, turning his head away from me for an obvious reason, while using his long, dreadful tail to flick away what indisputably was a tear coming from one of his teddy bear-like eyes.
   “It’s such a relief,” I said. “It’s everything we hoped for, dreamed of, and really, really wondered whether we’d ever see: nearly identical headlines on both the Washington Post’s and New York Times’ webpages: BIDEN BEATS TRUMP (the Times) and BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP (the Post). Can you believe it?”
   “I think we’ve covered the surprise and wonderful part,” Mr. O said. “But no, I can’t believe it, even though we both knew it was always possible.”

WE CONFERRED a while longer in our backyard, where we have our daily political conversations.
   And today it wasn’t a chore, given that it was a remarkably warm summer day here in Newport, R.I., even though it was early November.
   We decided that on the day when the networks, the newspapers and the news services all agreed that enough votes had been counted to declare Biden the winner, that we ought to to say something.
   So, we came up with the following:

                                        Joe Biden was (and is) The One.
   Biden was practically nobody’s first choice of a candidate, but he turned out to be the only Democrat who could have beaten Donald Trump. And “we’ – the editorial “we” who write the Tracking Trump blog – were among the dorks who completely missed that point.
   But as it turns out, Biden was and is the one person who could unite the self-destructive factions of the Democratic Party, along with Donald-Disaffected Republicans and lots of other people who really hated politics but disliked Trump more.
   One day, we went so far as to write a snarky anti-Biden post: GO JOE – GO AWAY. A lot of readers (and we use the phrase “a lot” advisedly) liked that one.
   And everyone hated a later one, in which we took a “2nd look”: MAYBE BIDEN IS THE RIGHT ONE TO TAKE ON TRUMP.

   Which reinforces the point that none of us has all the answers, especially a sweet dog and an optopossumistic opossum.
   Humility is critical. Let’s hope Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. can hang onto his.

                                                  Many, many heroes
   There have been thousands upon thousands of people who worked hard and worked smart, especially at the grassroots, to build new democratic structures, coalitions and new alliances that brought Trump down.
   They now may help to bring about great reforms to make it less likely that an evil demagogue will again take over the U.S. government in the way Trump has done.
   We’ll never know most of their names. But they started during the inspired Women’s Marches the day after Inauguration in 2017, wearing those great pink pussy hats. And we owe them.

                                        The Trump mystery
   We never will know why so many people fell under Trump’s spell.

                               Today’s victory isn’t enough
   Inspired as today’s outcome is, it’s only a beginning.
   One thing is for sure, no single reform, law or victory lasts – the outcomes of the Civil War, Roe Vs. Wade, the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the First Amendment, Social Security, Obamacare.
    Progress is temporary, vulnerable and always under attack. It’s not fair, but it’s a fact: nothing stays fixed.

                                      Trump’s future?
   Nobody knows what will become of him, especially backyard pundits like us, who can’t even vote (Memo to the Republican National Committee: Mr.O and I never tried to vote, so don’t use that as an idea for one of your phony lawsuits).
    Maybe, he’s really finished, politically and economically.
    Maybe, he’s a permanent demon, perpetually threatening, undermining, corrupting our public life.
    Maybe, he’ll get a second bout of coronavirus.
    Maybe, the third Mrs. T will activate the prenup.
    Maybe, Trump will resign, with Mike Pence becoming president for a few weeks, on the understanding that Pence will issue Trump a universal pardon, while Trump looks for a place that has a golf course, but lacks an extradition treaty with the United States.
   Maybe, Pence, being the worm that he is, will skip the part about the pardon.

                                   Will there be justice for Trump?
                  (See related item above).
   There’s great demand for, if not revenge, at least justice.
   But can anything compensate for his many misdeeds: the divided marriages, Thanksgiving meals ruined, the corruption, the damage to the Constitution, the suffering of immigrants, the injury to the environment, and the people dead and maimed by his unforgivable handling of Covid-19?
    No?
    We do know this: Donald John Trump’s worst nightmare, perhaps his only nightmare, is losing.
    Which just happened.

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DAY 1384

11/5/2020

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WHILE WE WAIT:
DREAMS ABOUT WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN;
& STILL COULD BE.

“IT’S BEEN A LONG DAY,” I SAID.
   “And now, it’s a long night,” Mr. O said.
   “So, where are we?” I asked.
   “Still waiting,” Mr. O said.
   “Still hoping,” I said.
   It was way beyond the time when Mr. O, the wunder-opossum of politics and I usually wrap up our state-of-the-nation discussions for the day.
   However, the networks had “special reports” at 10 p.m., perhaps hoping they’d be able to call the election, and promote Joe Biden from former vice president to future president-to-be.
   But there was no certainty, as they began.
   Biden was “leading” in the electoral college count, 253 to 214 for Trump.
   If you went to some websites, Biden had been moved up to 264 votes, with the Masters-of-the-Electoral-Maps throwing in Arizona’s 11 votes, bringing Biden within 6 tantalizing, so, so, soooo electoral votes close to the magical 270 that would make him the winner.
    But the Associated Press, the networks, the Times and the Post, were all holding back Arizona, trying to play strictly by the rules of certainty, while at the same time hinting, hinting, HINTING that sooner or later, Biden would get Arizona, plus Nevada (11 votes) and/or Pennsylvania (20) and maybe even Georgia (16)
   And that would be that.

BUT NOT YET.
   And we both sensed the cold despair shooting through our exhausted bodies, the awful feeling that it was possible that 17 votes, or just 6 votes, would be as close as Biden would get to calling the White House home.
   That Trump somehow would snatch it all back, confounding the same experts who’d been so sure that Biden would sweep into the White House, and the Democrats would retake the Senate and expand their hold on the House.
   Which didn’t happen on Election Day. Nor the day after; and so far not the night after.
Would our hearts be broken again? Just like 2016, tossing us into to perpetual nervousness, anxiousness and bewilderment every single day – not so much as a weekend off – for the next four years.
   But not yet.
   Hope still was in the air.

WHILE WE WAITED, there was lots and lots of stupid talk, some of it originating from yours truly and the Honorable Mr. 0.
   Like how, even if Biden won, he still would be dogged by Trump and his millions and millions of followers.
   Nasty people, every one them. Bigots. Environmental criminals. Covid-19 super-spreaders. Immigrant-haters. Anti-vaxxers. Grifters. Misogynists. Incompetents. Sycophants.
   And how disappointing it all was.

   They were a mean lot. So disappointing
   Can you imagine? Maine brought back Susan Collins, the phoniest of all “moderate” Republicans, for a fifth term in the Senate, so she could once again consider voting against her party, unless, upon reflection, she decided it’s better to vote with her party.
   So few of us, smart, principled, caring people.
   After four years, you’re still in a room, and half the people hate you. Look to your left; look to your right; you're surrounded by people who mean you actual harm. What’s got into them? Will we ever know? Do they know?

BUT HOLD ON!
   Let’s clear away some of the silly talk. (Why do liberals always act like this? They’re – we’re – such whiners. No wonder nobody likes us).
   First, if we’re going to get into Us-Vs-Them, there are more “Us’s”.
   Biden voters numbered 71.6 million, or 50.5 percent; Trumpsters, 68 million, or 48 percent.
   We know. We KNOW. It’s the weirdo electoral college system that counts. But that’s a flaw. Joe Biden should be president on winning 50.5 percent of the vote, which is what you’d expect from a democracy. Wouldn’t you be ashamed to be president, knowing your opponent got more votes?
   Secondly, it’s hard to beat an incumbent president. Not impossible, of course. But it’s hard. So, we’ve actually done that. Or we almost have.
   And how about this?
   The country may be split almost down the middle, but what we could call the “Biden Coalition” has been a pretty united crew of people, who have been able to put a lot of personal grievances and preferences aside for the greater good, and that’s a hard thing to do.
   There've been a fair number of Republicans willing to work, even vote, for the Democrat; a fair amount of conservatives voting progressive; a fair amount of liberals sticking with Middle-of-the-Road Joe. Lot of Black voters helping out White voters, knowing their rewards historically have been few, and always a lot less than they deserve, and that's happened in the past, especially when there was a war or an election to be won.
   And finally, let’s not sell President Biden short, if we get to call him that.
   There’s a lot of good that he can do in the next four years.
   It’s one thing that Trump has proved: leadership counts. When you have a terrible leader, you can get a lot of people to do terrible things. If you get a decent leader, a lot of people will do decent things.

SO, LET’S keep our hopes up.
   Maybe we’ll wake up in the morning, with a new president just a couple of months away from taking office.
   Maybe not. In that case, more people voted for the right guy than the wrong one. And they aren’t going anywhere.
   “So, get a good night’s sleep, Phoebe.”
   “Sweet dreams to you, Mr. O.”
   It always starts with a dream.

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DAY 1382

11/3/2020

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Days Until Election: 0

OUR ELECTION PREDICTION:
JOE BIDEN WINS

“YOU GO FIRST," Mr. O said.
   “No, you,” I said.
   It was the day before the final voting day, which in normal times, has been called Election Day, and Mr. O, the politically savvy opossum, and I had decided we would make a prediction. It was sunny, but cold and wicked windy in our backyard, so we decided to keep the meeting short.
   “Biden,” I said.
   “Biden,” he said.

WHY?
   “The pollsters,” I said.
   “You’re kidding,” Mr. O said. “Remember what happened in 2016?”
   “Of course,” I said, “which is the reason I’m not crazy about making any predictions.”
   “But why rely on the pollsters this time?” Mr. O asked.
   “Realistically, we have nothing else to go on,” I said. “And the people who got it wrong the last time say they’ve tried to overcome the problems that led them – and the rest of us – down the wrong path. And they all are hedging – saying that Trump has a chance to win again.”
   I pointed out the average, as tallied by RealClearPolitics, which showed Biden ahead, with a projected 50.7 percent of the vote, compared to 44 percent for Trump, a 6.7 point lead. Further, the “battleground states” had Biden with an average 2.6 percentage points lead.

Here’s how Nate Cohn analyzed it in the New York Times. (Cohn’s estimate of Biden’s lead is larger than the RCP figure. Please don’t ask me why; I’m just a sweet dog).

The final polls more or less comport with how we already viewed the race. Mr. Biden ends the race up by more than eight points nationwide — the largest lead a candidate has held in the final polls since Bill Clinton in 1996. He’s up by at least five points in states worth more than 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win. Beyond that, he’s got at least a nominal lead in states worth 350 electoral votes, and he’s just a 2012 polling error away from a sweeping landslide of more than 400 electoral votes.

But Cohn gives Trump a credible chance:

The real reason Mr. Trump still has an outside shot is simple: As in the final tallies of 2016, he still has a relative advantage in the states likeliest to decide the election compared with the nation as a whole. If you go down the list of states from best to worst for Mr. Biden, you’ll find that his 270th electoral vote would come from Pennsylvania, where he leads by just over five points. That’s a serious deficit for Mr. Trump, but it’s a lot better than his eight-plus-point deficit in the national vote. If Pennsylvania was Biden plus-8, like Michigan or the nation, it would be really hard to see a path for the president.

Here’s what Nate Silver, of the FiveThirtyEight blog wrote:

Biden’s chances of winning hover between the high 80s and low 90s in our forecast. Don’t get too obsessed with the exact number. What’s important to remember is that Biden is favored, but there is still a path for Trump. Trump might be the underdog, and he needs a big polling error in his favor, but bigger polling errors have happened in the past.

   Silver put Trump’s probability of winning at about 10 percent, about the same odds of it raining in Los Angeles, where, he said, it does rain 36 days a year.

“AND YOUR REASONS for predicting a Biden win?” I asked Mr. O.
   “It’s simple,” the marsupial said. “Trump is a terrible president and a danger to the world.”
   “Well, bad things happen to nice planets,” I said.
   “All the time,” Mr. O said. “But Trump has had four years of lucky breaks in which he’s escaped accountability, from the Hollywood Access tapes to the Mueller Report to impeachment, to supposedly coming down with Covid-19 and recovering, and it’s time all of that comes to an end. At some point, justice has to kick in.”
   “What troubles me the most,” Mr. O continued, “is that if, indeed, Trump gets the boot, it will be because of the way in which he’s handled the Covid-19 pandemic, or I should say, not handled it.”
   “It’s an ungodly price for everyone else to pay,” I said. “More than 9.3 million people infected, and 231,510 dead.”
   “It IS too high a price,” Mr. O acknowledged. “But probably had not the pandemic occurred, Trump would have easily been elected to a second term on the basis of the economy.”

“ONE FINAL MATTER,” I said. “ What if we’re wrong, the pollsters are wrong and Trump is reelected? We’ve been saying for years that the country, at least as a democracy, is dead. We’ve barely survived the first four years. What would we do for the next four?”
   “First, we would have to admit that we’ve been wrong about that,” Mr. O said. “We would have to say that we can survive; the country can survive; and that we'll just have to keep on fighting.”
   “But it would be a terrible four years,” I said.
   “Worse than you or I can imagine,” Mr. O said.
   “Which would be no excuse to give up,” I said.”
   “Really,” he agreed. “It’s not like there'd be another choice.”

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A "sweet dog" and a smart opossum consider a nation at risk.

The writers

PHOEBE, a "sweet dog" who came to Rhode Island in 2010 as a stray puppy from Missouri, was a political agnostic until Trump's catastrophic election. She tracked his presidency in a blog, which she decided to resurrect it this year when it became obvious that Republicans are committed to Trump's destructive policies

MR. O, an opossum, showed up in Phoebe's backyard somewhat mysteriously. He turned out to have genuine insight into political matters, and he agreed to assume co-author duties of the blog after Phoebe's previous writing partner, Cat, a cat, died.

CAT

DAY 1387

TRUMP VANQUISHEDTHOUGHTS ON A DAY OF MIRACLES

DAY 1384

WHILE WE WAIT:DREAMS ABOUT WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN; & STILL COULD BE.

DAY 1382

OUR ELECTION PREDICTION:JOE BIDEN WINS

The writers

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TRUMP VANQUISHED
THOUGHTS ON A DAY OF MIRACLES

WHILE WE WAIT:
DREAMS ABOUT WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN;
& STILL COULD BE.

OUR ELECTION PREDICTION:
JOE BIDEN WINS