Summary
Donald Trump is likely to claim victory on election night, despite the vote count possibly extending over several days.
Early tallies may lean Republican, reflecting in-person votes, while absentee ballots counted later may shift toward Democrats, creating a “blue shift.”
Key states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada may take extra time to declare results due to laws and ballot processing delays.
Trump might exploit early Republican leads to allege fraud.
The democrats could lead the entire election from the very first vote onwards, and he will still declare himself the winner. The next weeks will be very bumpy for the Americans. Let’s just hope it will only be weeks.
I would pay good money to have Trump be in sort of a Truman Show situation, where he’s Truman and everyone around him are actors.
He gets to be president but inside his little bubble.
He can be a dictator and then have his long lost father make an appearance around sweeps.
We get a sane president.
You’re free to watch that show, personally I’m sick of seeing the motherfucker. Let me know when he has his final Big Mac Attack and stops wasting oxygen.
He sort of did that to his own father with the family business.
You’d need room in that bubble for approximately half of the USA. Trump isn’t what’s wrong with America. The fact that the vote is this close is what’s scary!!
The courts have prepared for expedited process for election cases, shortening deadlines and speeding up cases, so hopefully it should cut short legal schenanigans, and actually resolve shit wayyy before certification deadlines
Practice makes perfect.
That’s certainly a possibility because he’s a chronic liar. But true or not, his followers will believe him and go to bed happy. Then when the final count is over they will refuse to believe he lost because in their minds they literally saw him win. This is his con man skill in action - the one thing he’s actually good at - plant a lie in people’s minds, and because it was there first it makes a nest and fights off other ideas that try to displace it.
The first sign of a weak man is that he cannot accept reality.
Most of those don’t have an army of sycophants trying to rewrite reality in realtime for them.
Anything you say against their worldview is automatically “misinformation” even when you have peer studies to back up your claim.
That’s what it means to live in a “post-truth” world. There are essentially two overlapping but competing worldviews each with their own “reality”. Which is fucking sad. When I was young I imagined the internet being what would eventually connect us all and truly inform everyone. Instead, we got echo chambers festering into actual terrorism.
Expecting humans to be anything other than greedy, violent, and tribalistic was always a fantasy. That’s the unfortunate truth, the knowledge of which is the primary separator between childhood and adulthood, at least as far as mental maturity is concerned.
I really hope that Harris wins Iowa since that would be a big damper to Trump declaring victory.
It would be pretty cool if gen Z women who never answer when pollsters call their phones turn up in droves and flip many red states that were assumed to be automatic Trump wins. Especially Texas and Florida.
Ugh I’m almost there…don’t stop…do alaska
They have RCV so depending on third parties listed it could go to Harris but I know nothing of the frontier state.
Between this and a throbbing_banjo this thread took a hard u-turn 🙂
Isn’t Alaska covered in enough white already?
We’re doing what we can
He’ll probably declare victory as soon as the polls open.
The orange shit gibbon is still declaring victory from 2020
Scary to think that in the future, some parts of the country may talk about the 2020 election the same way they do about “The War of Northern Agression.”
It’s scary to think what the last 10 years will be taught as 50 years from now… regardless of the outcome
The fact this isn’t localized to the US is the part that has me sweating. We’ve moved on from a lot of terrible things in America’s past, but with so many countries experiencing much the same thing at once, I don’t know where we find the good influence in the world.
I hope this will end up being a great wake up to the responsibilities of democracy, but I’ll probably be long gone before the ripples of the event of Bush v Gore are done shaking the system. It’s going to take a long time to clean things up even if we start tomorrow since the power hungry have gotten away with so much up until this point.
This book was written back in 1970 and predicted a lot of this mess.
“Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler. The author was a sociologist; his take was the the change from the old Industrial Age to the new Digital Era would be too overwhelming for many people to handle. They would try desperately to go back to a time they understood.
Sound familiar?
Wow, that was a ride! I read the Wikipedia synopsis and saw there was a documentary made about it with Orson Wells as the narrator and it was on Youtube and only about 40 minutes, so I checked it out. The intro was so trippy, with brash visuals and loud, violent sound effects combined with a generic John Carpenter synth soundtrack. It was like a deleted scene from Clockwork Orange!
I don’t know how much the content differs from the book, but it was a nice insight to my parent’s generation and their feelings to the future, or our now I suppose. It was somewhat eye-opening hearing them talk about built by number babies and cloning years before the first IVF baby was born, and things like an interview with a polyamorous couple. The idea of things like changing race at will is still somewhat crazy, but I guess one could carry thing over to confusion about gender fluidity.
It was a crazy mix of 'Member Berries, Old Man Yells at Cloud, but also with some empathy one can actually relate to less mentally flexible people experiencing the titular Future Shock. Where I lose a bit of that sympathy though is in reading the Wiki entry on Toffler himself, it quotes him:
“Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest,” he said. “Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone.”
I got to spend a lot of time with all 4 of my grandparents from the Greatest Generation. To varying degrees, all seemed to eventually accept, if not embrace the modern times of race equality and even bits of homosexuality. None used computers or much advanced tech, but they didn’t seem to begrudge it either. I certainly never heard them complain about too much electric lighting, air conditioning, or running water.
My parent’s generation, the Boomers, seem to be going kicking and screaming into the future though. My mom was, and still at heart is a hippie, so she does not have these issues for the most part. My dad and all his friends though seem deeply upset we are not in 1970 anymore. If they didn’t have it then, they don’t need it now. There seems to be no desire to learn, or to accept new things or ways of seeing the world.
Perhaps life has sped up faster than our minds have changed to handle that. Those rooted in tradition perhaps had more time to adapt in the past. But I don’t think my generation has just turned our backs on our parents. They just do not seem to be accepting the embrace we are offering, and I don’t know if we can make them.
It’s definitely a deeper topic to continue to explorer that can go far deeper than writing it off with an “OK, Boomer,” but it’s an unfortunate circumstance when you reach out a hand to someone you care about and they just smack it away. My immediate family is not close for a number of reasons, and as they age, I fear how tense things will get whenever the point arrives where they are forced to start relinquishing some control to my brother and me.
Toffler inspired science fiction writer John Brunner.
Brunner’s book ‘Stand On Zanzibar’ won the 1969 Best Science Fiction Novel. It’s set in the early 21st Century. He followed Toffler’s ideas and it’s scary how many things he got right.
The GOP decided that Monica’s blue dress and Stormy Daniels should be part of every school kid’s curriculum
Hayes ending reconstruction is one of the worst and possibly one of the most consequential decisions in the history of mankind.
Lmao, look at this optimist! Thinking we’ll have schools, or society in 50 years.
I declare him a loser here and now.
better hope biden handles the violent mob correctly, instead of how it was responded to last time
I think you spelled “will definitely“ wrong 😉
Nah I approve of OPs wording. More people need that level of basic epistemological humility in their everyday speech.
Absentee ballots are one reason for “red mirage” that usually gives early leads to Republican candidates. The other reason is simply that Repubs tend to live in smaller counties with fewer people in them, which means their vote counts get finished earlier than larger urban areas where Democrats tend to live. The “red mirage” is followed by a “blue shift” when the democratic votes come in.
Early voting in the blue wall states is blocked for count until after precinct counts. So you will see early in the night, a mirage where perhaps Trump is up. This is when he’ll say he won, but by early morning, and the early vote count, the story might change. However Florida does count its early vote first.
The red mirage/blue shift will probably be much smaller than prior elections, since it seems Trump supporters are using early or mail in voting more than before. The splits by party for these methods are smaller so far this year.
Trump can declare whatever he wants. No one is going to listen to him.
That’s the problem a LOT of people listen to him now and will when he try to cheat and declaring victory really early is only one of those try
They will. This is the entire reason for the attempted coup last time. Trump was up early, declared victory, then absentee ballots were counted and …. It must be fraud
- Absentee ballots tipping election to Biden = fraud
- Trump telling Georgia Sect. of State to “find” votes putting Trump over top = official act immune from prosecution
His fans will listen, and that’s the plan. He did this in 2016 and 2020 - declare victory during the “red mirage” portion of the evening, when he’ll probably be ahead, because Republicans tend to live in low-population areas that finish their counting early because they have fewer ballots. This is a well known phenomenon on national election nights. Democratic votes tend to come in later, because more democrats live in larger urban areas that take longer to count. After Trump declares victory based on these early returns, his fans will go to bed happy. Then when all the votes are in and it turns out he lost, they’ll “know” the election was stolen because in their minds they already “saw” him win.
