While it is the policy of this publication to report the news and not interfere in the activities of the Meat Space, it is the explicit belief of the Writer that his thoughts accidentally control the Universe and that if he openly states a prediction or opinion with any confidence, Reality will reorganize itself for the sole purpose of spoiling it. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution for the millions of lives at stake, the publication of this entry has been withheld until after the US Presidential electoral contest or alcohol-related death of the Writer, whichever starts - or ends – first
The Hour of the Wolf, the dearly departed Max von Sydow once explained in Ingmar Bergman's underrated horror flick of the same name, is the hour between night and dawn. The hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, when ghost and demons are most powerful.
The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.
* * * * *
I can remember it vividly: It was 6pm, I was standing on the street corner with a friend of mine, on the way to the bar we’d booked to watch the 2016 election. We were so sure of the result. We were so sure. We’d even made last minute adjustments to our pool picks, it sounded like Clinton was probably going to win Florida, after all. I took a long deep drag of a cigarette, threw it on the ground, and stomped it out. “Alright,” I said, “Let’s go watch this fucker get taken down.”. By 2am I was sitting, alone in my living room, staring at my phone. Three bottles of champagne in the fridge and a few cigars in the humidor, waiting for an afterparty that never materialized. It was the end of Western civilization, they’d pulled the whole temple down on themselves.
If nothing else, the 2020 election cycle is giving us all a chance to re-examine the assumptions and understandings we previously took for granted. We're revisiting what polls are important and the need to look at state-level predictions and not just the national picture. We're learning how states count ballots and how cable newsrooms determine when and how to call the races. I'm about to find out just how bloated my liver and heart can get before each rip themselves out of my carapace and crawl away.
These are all important pieces of data to have.
As I write this, I don't know who won the Presidential contest (if, indeed, anyone has yet), and I don't really know how they did it (or didn't). I don’t know what the senate or anything looks like. I've had many thoughts though - oh, yes - but I dare not put them on paper or speak them out loud. I've become neurotically superstitious about US elections (all elections, really, but few have the power to vaporize me in atomic backwash), and I'm convinced that basically anything I say will jinx it. If I tell you I think Biden will win 350 electoral college votes he'll lose every state, if I tell you Trump will win 350 electoral college votes, he will. There's no winning against this impossible universe.
So I'm trapped in my own Hour of the Wolf, it seems. All bets are off. There are no rules. I have no idea what will actually happen and my imagination is running rampant with all sorts of possibilities I'd never had to consider before. Civil War II? Scorched Earth Lame Duck Presidency? It's like my first time all over again - on one hand unbelievably exciting; on the other, absolutely terrifying.
For the last few months I’ve been scribbling out little notes to myself. Thoughts on how the race and campaign was developing. Some of it literally scratched out on random pieces of paper around my pandemic bunker apartment, others as three or four sentences sitting in a draft blog post, seeping through in a tweet or two. What follows here then are some of these notes, condensed and smoothed out, and somewhat organized. Just things that have been in my head that I need to get out before I burst. By the time you read them the die will have already been cast and hopefully I can’t fuck any of it up, we're just waiting for the universe to unfold now.
*****
Let's start off with the basics: it seems impossible to me that Donald Trump can conceivably win the popular vote. Not just because the polls clearly don't suggest that, but because little in the past 4 years strikes me as likely to make very few groups of people MORE pro-Trump but many groups of people substantially LESS pro-Trump. Additionally, the polls consistently point to a sizeable shift in some groups compared to 2016 (heck, compared to 2019): Biden ties or leads or comes much closer among all age groups, among white women, among men, in nearly in all regions than Clinton did 4 years ago. Of course it can all be hogwash but it agrees with the fundraising numbers, and it jives with the bizarre Grand Coalition the Biden campaign has stitched together where I now receive emails from Bill Clinton-era cabinet secretaries, Bernie Sanders and the AOC squad, and Bush II administration war criminals all on the same day and all pushing support for the same ticket.
I’m old enough to remember declaring that demographics would make Texas a toss up state after 2012 and that Romney represented the last hope of a Republican party determined to focus entirely on older white men. Obviously I was wrong then and I’m far too spooked to make such a bold claim yet, but it’s hard to imagine that the damage Trump and his enablers in the GOP have done to their credibility among huge and growing portions of the electorate – in particular women - will be soon forgotten or undone. That so much of this goes hand in hand with enabling the kind of tin pot authoritarianism of a young adult dystopian novel, I think, makes the damage that much more permanent. We can’t go back to the way things were, not while McConnell and Graham and Sessions and Pompeo and Cruz and Rubio still draw any water in that party.
The 2016 election was like finding out your neighbor did time as an axe murderer. It doesn’t matter how polite they are or how good a neighbor they are now, you’re never letting your kids go over there alone.
*****
The electoral college is trickier to predict, but here history helps calm my nerves. There are three states Trump won in 2016 which were surprising - and incredibly close - upsets, which control the balance of electoral college, and which had been Democratic states for many years beforehand. Biden not only keeps polling in the lead in all three but tied or leading in a bunch of other states too. Trump likely needs to sweep all of the 5-8 genuine battleground states, Biden only needs to pick up a few of them, and the poll suggest he has a few strong prospects to choose from.
The X factor to me is the unbridled, unmitigated, bald-faced fascism of the ailing husk of the Republican party. What depraved depths are they willing to go to in order to cheat their way into a few more years of power? Throwing out ballots is small potatoes for these goons, so surely nonsense lawsuits and armed insurrection come as second nature to them. They're all Sons of the Confederacy anyway, getting shot to death by the National Guard is practically a family tradition.
The campaign itself has been a whole different roller coaster. Issues, dear boy, issues. It's only early November as I write this but already the week the President had covid seems like a distant memory, but it was less than a month ago. At the time it seemed like it could have been a craven attempt to gain public sympathy but I don't think so - the last thing the Trump campaign needed was anyone to be reminded that the bodies are piling up in the morgues and this pandemic is raging on unchecked (as I type this I see Ragin' Cajun' Jim Carville has just tried to coin "it's the pandemic, stupid!" and predicted Trump will be the loser by 10pm on election night. Carville is my kind of crazy but I'm not putting any money on that). The pandemic is hitting the pro-Trump places who until recently insisted the virus didn't exist, and I think that reality is unravelling the whole narrative Trumpers have been using to hold their world together.
Hunter Biden too, seems to be largely a miss by the Republican strategists and the closer they cling to it the more desperate they seem. The accusations of cronyism or corruption or insurmountable entrenched entitlement stuck harder against Hillary Clinton because she was, after all - despite an exceptional career in her own right - a career politician who got her start in politics from the starboard side of her husband's White House and was not very successful at hiding the deep rooted belief that it was her turn, both in 2008 or in 2016. The Clinton family has always seemed like the real life analogy for House of Cards' viciously ambitious Underwoods and the more they replicated that imagery the easier it was to make the more ludicrous accusations against her stick.
By way of contrast, the Hunter Biden story largely seems to remind people that Joe Biden has always been a remarkably kind and well-liked family man who has endured significant personal loss but still managed to do his duty while being a loving parent. Every time they try to make hay of the father-son relationship (candid photos! leaked text messages!), voters get a peek at what it would be like to have a caring, human father in the Oval Office instead of the cheating, groping, crude, child abusive sociopath they have now. I was reminded of the Conservative attack ads of our own 2015 campaign: "Look at Justin Trudeau, look how HANDSOME he is and look at all of the disgusting NORMAL JOBS he's had before just like you! Outrageous! Vote for our boring robot leader with a titanium golf club wedged up his ass and who absolutely hates you."
It's almost hard to see why it's not resonating.
At least not with everyone, mind you. Clearly there's a significant portion of the US electorate firmly willing to be thrown into a burning cauldron and reduced to their bones for their beloved Fuhrer. We've seen it throughout this campaign but it's reaching a particular fervor at the close...the Y'all Quieda trucks draped in Trump flags trying to surround Biden campaign busses (a comparison to Al Quieda is actually unfair, in my opinion, as doubtless the American version insist on using Made in America trucks which is fucking insane. Any good fanatic knows the value of a used Toyota Hilux), or legions of supporters trapped after their covid superspreader rallies in the cold and dark by a campaign that actively hates them, is trying to murder everyone, and hasn't been afraid to hide it. To each their own: My advice to the die-hard Republican supporters is to go on and die.
But back to Covid. Carville's not wrong - the pandemic is the prism through which the entire election has turned. It perfectly exposed the administration's complete idiocy and willful negligence. It drew a perfect contrast between the calm, steady, competent experience of a caring former Vice President and the indefensible childlike tantrums of the dementia addled corrupt incumbent. It's been raising the stakes all year and giving regular folks on the ground the growing understanding that nonsense comes out of whichever failed amateur pornstar is currently briefing from the White House podium is disconnected from their reality and is entirely self-serving.
*****
So that's what I've got. I said at the start I don't know what's going to happen. I still don't. It's the Hour of the Wolf and it may be rapturous or catastrophic but you came for some thoughts and maybe a prediction so here it is: Biden reclaims Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That's enough to end it, but I believe that one or two of Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona will flip too and seal the deal with ~300 electoral college votes. That's what SHOULD happen, anyway, if I haven't fucked it up by typing this all out.
Christ I hate this. I will see you on the other side.
