Mid-Week Café Thoughts, Oct 24

Senate elections, suburban voters in Philadelphia, PA’s vote on Election Night, the Electoral College popular vote compact, and Gertrude Stein

Photo by pawel szvmanski on Unsplash

The balance of the Senate

The balance of the Senate has some interesting pathways it could go down this election. A surprisingly strong independent campaign by Dan Osborn in Nebraska has Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in danger of an upset. That race is a good place to donate money in these last couple weeks if you want Democrats to have a chance keeping the Senate. Democrats are expected to lose Montana sadly for Jon Tester, and Ohio is close but Sherrod Brown is a proven red state survivor. Though unlikely, it’s not totally impossible for Democrats to pull off upsets in Florida or Texas where Ted Cruz and Rick Scott are both generally disliked by their own party as well as by Democrats. Outside of seeing Trump lose in a landslide, seeing Ted Cruz get kicked out of the Senate to spend the rest of his life devolving into an unlikeable podcast bro is the best kind of November 5th pleasure I can imagine.

Lisa Murkowski, potential 2025 wild card

Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski endorsed Alaska’s Democratic Representative Mary Peltola. The increasingly independent Murkowski could potentially be persuaded to switch parties and caucus with the Democrats, particularly if Trump wins and starts doing crazy dumb shit. Alaska’s primary system with ranked voting means Murkowski is less beholden to loud MAGA minorities as in other states’ primary systems — she voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, and before that made Alaskan history winning a write-in election after proto-MAGA Tea Party Republicans voted for someone crazier in her primary — which gives her the freedom to make a boss move like wielding the balance of control in the Senate if the math works out that way. She knows her party has turned into a zombie feeding electorally on the caloric emptiness of Trumpist demagoguery. Time to flip, girl.

The 20,000 dumbest Pennsylvanians will decide our fate as a country…

Will democracy prevail, or will we give a wild card wannabe dictator, whose only public interest in the details of history have revolved around how loyal Hitler’s generals were, another chance to be president, this time without the inhibitions his utter ignorance of how politics or the government work gifted us in his first term?

It’s literally up to the least informed people in the suburbs around Philadelphia, who over eight years still somehow haven’t formed enough of an opinion on Donald Trump to decide whether his frequent threats to use the military against American citizens, his hoarding of top secret national secrets at his gauche resort for money laundering oligarchs, his credible conviction for lying about raping a woman, or his lifetime of fraud and sociopathic narcissism are deal breakers for the job of leader of the free world. I’m not really trying to punch down on them, this is just a manifestation of my exasperation that Donald Trump can be such a cartoonishly textbook example of the worst incarnation of a US president yet the election is basically statistically tied, and it’s two weeks until voting day yet a significant percentage of voters haven’t bothered checking in on the candidates or policies yet. And it’s not just Philadelphians, the dumbest people in Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Charlotte matter too. However, American fascism could be quickly nipped in the bud with a convincing majority in Pennsylvania on election night.

Just kidding, Pennsylvania will be a shit-show on election night

And it’s all Republicans’ fault. Republicans in PA have intentionally mandated that mail-in ballots NOT be counted until election day, which means, if the election is close, it could take several days to count up all those votes and find out the winner. Other states count those ballots as they come in so they’re tallied on election day, but not PA. Republicans have intentionally slowed down their state’s voting process so in partisan bullshittery Donald Trump can point to the expected sudden surges in Democratic votes — because Trump has made such a big deal over the years about how his voters SHOULDN’T mail in their votes — to pretend the election is being rigged against him.

Pennsylvania Republicans are not only fucking their constituents’ Constitutional voting rights, they’re straight up sabotaging their state’s election to fuck over the majority of Americans who will vote for Kamala Harris so that Pennsylvania’s electoral slate won’t be accepted by a partisan GOP-controlled House of Representatives, and the election will be decided by number of state delegations in the House, of which Republicans currently have a populationally disproportionate majority.

If I was a more profane writer, I’d say “Fuck the Republicans for their shameless political bullshit and tireless work fucking over our democracy like Constitutional traitors,” but I’m not, so I’ll just say I hope all the uninformed suburban Philadelphians google some of Trump’s crimes before they vote.

Why the Electoral College should be abolished

It’s an odd fluke, utterly unanticipated by our Founding Fathers — who couldn’t envision the inevitability of their Constitution leading to bipolar, nationalized political parties, or that their Electoral College WOULDN’T step in to stop the most shameless crackpot autocrat in US history — that US elections every four years hinge on a slowly evolving half-dozen swing states, but this is why the Electoral College and its dumb election math divorced from the popular consent of the people need to be abolished.

This technically could require a Constitutional Amendment, but a coalition of states do have a workaround in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact where they all agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, and it activates once enough states join to have a majority of electoral votes. Oompfh, I love this idea. In the last eight elections, Democrats have twice won the most votes and been denied the White House, and won seven of those elections. Because of that, the Supreme Court has a 6–3 majority mostly appointed by presidents America did not choose. The Judicial Branch has already been captured by minority power, so states must protect the right of the people to demand the president be their choice.

Particularly in a country with such fucked up legislatures as ours, with so much gerrymandering, and our absurdly undemocratic US Senate where California, 39 million, and Wyoming, 600,000, have the same representation, and our first-past-the-post primaries that create eternal Republican districts which encourage and reward extremist candidates who are vocal about their hatred of Americans and fair elections. Our executive election system has some major flaws that can be addressed by the Compact protecting the consistent majority from the fucked up minority, currently huffing conspiratorial MAGA fumes of fascist demagoguery like neo-monarchists.

On that note, have you made your voting plan?

Make your plan to vote if you haven’t! What day are you going to do it? I’m voting absentee and in-person!

An interesting excerpt on America from “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”

I’m in this book by Gertrude Stein now, and it’s an entertaining read if you’re interested in the artistic and literary milieu that orbited around the Parisian salon of larger-than-life personality Gertrude Stein that included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson between the 1900s and 1930s. The book was published in 1933, which makes this quote about America like a snapshot of historical perspective:

“Gertrude Stein always speaks of America as being now the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living of commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.”

If you have any reactions to this quote, share them in the comments! 🥃

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