These are four real names of people who signed in to vote at our polling station on Tuesday:
Alexander Calder
Sara Lee
Love Lady Belle Young
Zaw Oo
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Ratings for network TV coverage of election results plummeted this year. Here’s the reason: it’s terrible. Since 2016, it has been apparent that a bizarre set of protocols are in place that prevent them from reporting the truth about presidential elections.
You may recall that in 2016, it was obvious to everyone that Trump had won at about midnight on election night, yet no network reported the news until dawn. This year, I knew at 10:15 on election night Trump had won, but the first network to “call” the presidential race was CNN at 5:30 AM, more than seven hours later.
(One of the more laughable episodes can still be found online. On CNN very serious-looking people in suits and ties and dresses and $300 haircuts are reporting Georgia results, specifically that Trump was holding a lead of 120,000 votes with only 100,000 votes yet to count in the state. But instead of reporting, “Trump has taken Georgia,” they cut to Suzie or Sally or somebody, and she spent the next two minutes reporting on where those all-important uncounted votes would be coming from.)
I don’t have a good theory on why they do this. Do they simply want viewers to stay tuned in as long as possible? I understand it must be painful for some of them to say the words, “Trump has won,” but that doesn’t explain why Fox News wouldn’t call the election either.
By the way, the best source for “who won” on a presidential election night is Pinnacle.com, the offshore international betting site that gives odds on thousands of sporting events and a few political races. If you want to bet a million bucks on a soccer game in Pakistan, Pinnacle is where you go. And if you want to bet on a U.S. election, Pinnacle (or a similar outfit), is where you must go because sports books in the U.S. cannot legally take such bets.
Odds on the Trump-Harris race changed daily leading up to the election, and the final odds as the polls opened on Tuesday had Trump around a 3–2 favorite. They continued to post odds all day. When the polls closed, the odds started changing as results came in.
Then, about 10:15 PM, the odds on Kamala Harris winning shot up to 20-1. Shortly thereafter, it was 50-1 for a few minutes, and then the odds board shut down. At that point, Trump had won. If Pinnacle was willing to take a $100 bet on Kamala winning, and pay you $2000 (or later, $5000), if she won, then Kamala no longer had a shot. The race was over.
This is why sports books like Pinnacle are so reliable. A pundit or a polltaker who predicts a winner pays no price if they are wrong. A sports book is putting millions on the line.
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For me, probably the most important reason I hoped Trump would win was to ensure the continued existence of Israel. Second on my list, however, was the hope that rights of free speech in America would be restored, and that the new administration would try to protect them in the future.
However, I will believe in the rescue of the First Amendment when I see it.
RFK Jr. definitely cares about this issue because he was silenced and his presidential campaign was destroyed by government censorship and de-platforming, with the help of social media moguls like Zuckerberg. Musk, however, while he talks a good game, has a mixed record on the issue. Yes, Twitter is not the outpost for the thought police it was before he took over, but content censorship has not disappeared from the platform.
As for Trump---well, free speech was never a major concern of his in the past, and he has never shown me that he understood the importance of it or of its role in our Constitutional system, so I’ll be watching what happens. Today he gave a speech on his plan to dismantle the government censorship apparatus, and that’s encouraging.
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I worked the polls on Tuesday, something I had never done before, and it changed my perspective on the process somewhat. It was a long day, from 6:30 AM to 8:30 PM, so I was glad when it was over, but it was a pleasure to pitch in with five strangers, all from different walks of life, all with different tasks, and get a job done. It made me feel like a part of “the community” rather than a crank, which is what I am.
The polling station for the 38th District, 13th Precinct is in the Mifflin School in the East Falls neighborhood of Philadelphia. There are five precincts voting in the school so there were about thirty poll workers and maybe 2000 voters. It’s a heavily Democratic area, as is most of Philadelphia. Our precinct recorded 336 votes for Harris and 73 for Trump, and the other precincts reported similar numbers.
As the only Republican in our crew of six (my title was Minority Inspector), I was well-treated by the rest of the gang and I was grateful for that, and also for the fact that no issue of a partisan nature ever came up. Over the course of our fourteen hours together, the one topic that was NOT discussed was politics.
Since the election was so fraught with tension, and since there is no shortage of loonies in the City of Brotherly Love, I was expecting (hoping?) there would be some sort of excitement or disruption or shouting, but there was nothing until about 7 PM when most of the voting was over and the crowds were pretty much gone. A young guy in an Eagles shirt had just voted, and as he was leaving, he stopped in the middle of the voting operation and screamed “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” as loud as he could, then stood there for a few moments awaiting a response. The boss of our little crew (the Judge of Elections), a woman about 5’2” who was 7 ½ months pregnant and wearing an N-95 mask, immediately got up and walked toward the guy shouting, “There’s no electioneering allowed in here!” He was already headed for the door, however.
Shortly thereafter, we heard a car horn honking repeatedly outside and then an engine revving for ten or fifteen seconds. Then, I think he left.
The next fifteen minutes were spent with election workers walking around sharing their outrage and expressing how frightened they were and how dangerous the guy was, and getting up their nerve to call the police. (Remember---this incident occurred in Philadelphia, where most actual felonies are politely overlooked.)
Somebody did call the police and a cop arrived about an hour later, heard the story, took the list of witnesses that had been compiled for him, and departed.
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I wrote several articles in the lead-up to this election, and there are three things about which I was completely wrong.
First, Obama may not be the evil Svengali I thought he was, or perhaps he simply took his eye off the ball for a minute, but because he was in complete control of the Biden White House, I assumed he would be able to orchestrate the transition, dump Joe cleanly, and replace him with a sentient being willing to serve as Barack’s figurehead from 2025 to 2029. But events overtook him. Kamala Harris was never the plan and Obama didn’t want her, but somehow she became the candidate. Perhaps she was simply Joe’s revenge. When Biden was finally forced to issue his resignation letter, there was no endorsement of anyone. It was only a half hour later that he released his second bombshell of the day anointing her as his successor.
Next, I consistently criticized the Republican efforts to ensure a fair and honest contest. They were taken so completely by surprise in allowing 2020 to be stolen that I had zero confidence in their ability or desire to clamp down on the cheating this time. But they did. The story of how that battle was fought and won is yet to be fully told, but they did it, and they deserve all the credit they have earned.
And finally, I was wrong about the senate race in Pennsylvania, where Republican Dave McCormick unseated Democrat Bob Casey Jr. This result was much more surprising than Trump beating Harris in the state. The name Casey (father and son) has been on the ballot for over forty years in Pennsylvania without a stain on their good names, and it never occurred to me a Casey could lose an election unless a massive corruption and bribery case suddenly appeared, or perhaps a Diddy-level sex scandal, and the chance of either of those happening was basically zero.
McCormick won because of Trump’s coattails, and because Casey is a very standard-brand Democrat in a year where that was not a good thing to be.
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While working the polls at the Mifflin School, I was permitted to use the bathroom in the Teacher’s Lounge, and the experience shook me to my core.
If you are like me and 300 million other kids, you went to a school with a Teacher’s Lounge you were never permitted to enter, and to which the door was always closed. Since I never saw the inside, and since I was a child, and since teachers were mysterious creatures, all I could do was fantasize about what the inside of a Teacher’s Lounge looked like, and over the course of the next sixty years of my life, these fantasies calcified themselves in my brain and became reality.
I was certain there were soft couches, a wet bar, a massage table so they could rub each other, a big TV, a pool table and a pinball machine or two, in addition to a luxurious washroom with perfumes and powders and beauty products.
Certain. I was certain of all this. Then on Tuesday, I finally saw one.
It was a misshapen room, perhaps a hundred square feet, of obviously left-over space that couldn’t be used for much else. There was nothing on the walls, a linoleum floor with a single throw rug, one frosted window looking out onto a dark interior courtyard with a couple trash cans in it, and two stuffed chairs with the stuffing coming out. I have been interrogated by police in nicer rooms.
The tiny bathroom had an ancient toilet, a sink, a tiny mirror, paper towels and toilet paper. The best I can say of it is that it was functional, and the sort of bathroom you would be pleased to find in a bus station because you would be expecting worse.
I am still processing this revelation and wondering about other mistaken fantasies I retain from my childhood.
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Usually, in presidential elections, there are a few swing states where both parties focus most of their time and money. On election day, however, there are often a couple of surprises---states nobody thought was a “swing state” because everyone assumed Mr. X would win and Ms. Y had no shot.
There were no such surprises this time. From 2020, there were seven swing states---Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. Trump took Georgia then and Biden took the other six.
This time, Trump won all seven, but neither he nor Harris were able to flip any other states. The seven swing states in 2020 were the only ones in play in 2024.
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Of all the what-if questions about this election, one of the more intriguing is what if Harris had chosen Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate.
No one can say whether it would have changed the outcome, of course, but I believe it would have improved the Democrats’ chances, for several reasons.
First, Tim Walz added nothing to the ticket, and no one can point to a place where he helped push the Dems over the top. The results in Minnesota are revealing.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 233,012 votes, 52.4% to 45.3 %. This time, Trump still lost, but he cut the margin to 138,145 votes, with 51.1% for Harris and 46.9% for Trump, even though Walz was, and is, the sitting governor in the state.
More importantly, dropping Shapiro from consideration because he is a Jew turned out to be not only embarrassing but ineffective. It hurt Harris among Jewish voters of course, but it also did nothing to bring American Muslims to the Dems. Dearborn, Michigan is the most Muslim town in the U.S., and it is represented in Congress by the radical Jew-hater Rashida Tlaib, (D., Hamas). Yet Harris lost Dearborn. Trump won there with 42%, Jill Stein took 18%, and Harris came in with only 36%.
Finally (and this is purely subjective), Josh Shapiro is an articulate, good-looking young guy who is generally well-liked in Pennsylvania while Tim Walz came across as a folksy doofus. I can’t believe Shapiro would have done worse than Walz, and he could have done a lot better.
Copyright2024MichaelKubacki