Random Electoral Observations
Donald Trump and Joe Biden both seem to have proportionally small hands, although Trump’s are obviously the smaller, as one can see from any photo of him together with his wife, whose hands appear considerably longer than his. Nevertheless, both men are famous for being incapable of keeping their little hands to themselves.
That’s shorthand, if you will, for the basic problem of modern politics.
If Trump loses the election, he will, as per his character and history, blame the defeat on Anthony Fauci, Robert Mueller, James Comey, The New York Times, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Hillary Clinton, John Kelly, CNN, John Bolton, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Mike Pence.
If Biden loses, by contrast, he will blame nobody, since he will not remember the names of any of the people involved.
Trump’s 2016 advantage, namely being the (fake) outsider option for a nation sick of insiders, is long gone now. Trump has very publicly played with the insiders, and been played by them, for his entire first term. The only people left buying the nonsense about Trump being the non-politician who was going to sweep in and “drain the swamp” are the internet kooks who still think Trump is in the White House to blow the lid off Washington’s child sex ring.
(Clarification: I do not call those true believers kooks because they think the Washington political establishment is knee-deep in sexual predation and blackmail — I believe that too — but because they think Donald Trump cares a tick about any of that, let alone wishes to expose any of it.)
Trump’s last hope: Remind the electorate, as loudly and as often as possible, that should he die or become otherwise incapacitated in office during a second term, Mike Pence would become president, whereas if Biden dies or becomes incapacitated while in office — which seems far more likely, truth be told — the president would be Kamala Harris. I don’t imagine that would be an effective gambit — America is now far too politically correct for that — but I merely note that it might be the best option he has left, barring a foreign attack.
As of this writing, ABC reports that 31 million early ballots have already been cast in the “November 3rd” U.S. election, which equates to approximately 20 percent of all votes cast in the 2016 election. In other words, roughly a fifth of likely U.S. voters have already voted, two weeks prior to the “election date.” And of course many of those millions voted some time ago.
Early or absentee ballots used to make sense as a means of ensuring that eligible voters stationed overseas in the military, or otherwise practically incapable of being on home soil on election day, would still be able to exercise their democratic privilege. But when a fifth of a nation’s votes have already been cast two weeks before the election, something has gone completely haywire with the concept of national elections, not to mention the concept of representative democracy.
One would have thought the whole purpose of having election days was to prevent the processes of government from being reduced to, or swallowed up by, the calculations and distractions of campaign season. In other words, the tenuous aim of representative government is to choose representatives and then allow them to represent, which would seem to necessitate a temporal structure designed to cordon off a very limited number of predetermined days for choosing new representatives.
In addition, one must question the wisdom of having an official election cycle at all, if in reality a fifth of the electorate (or more) may cast votes far away from the actual day set aside for choosing new representatives. That is, if the voting laws effectively tell citizens that their voting rights entail no responsibility to actually care who is running for election, or to pay attention to anything those candidates say or do in the run-up to the election day itself, then why is the political calendar divided into election and non-election seasons anymore? In other words, if major, even cataclysmic new events, revelations, or decisions by or about the candidates, in the weeks or months prior to election day, are to be treated as of no account, since most voters are free to cast their ballots outside of that electoral timeframe, then why not just cancel the election day ruse altogether, and determine representation by a kind of rolling ballot running freely, year-round and continuously.
From CNN, dateline any day:
President Trump has decided to nominate Judge Amy — oh, sorry folks, this just in: Mr. Trump isn’t president anymore, it’s Joe Biden now, and he is rescinding the nomination of…wait a moment, it seems there are some late-day ballots for Kim Kardashian being counted in Ms. Kardashian’s county, so we’ll have to wait on that Biden rescinding of former President Trump’s supreme court nominee until those ballots — um, just a moment…. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’re just receiving word that President-Elect Lebron James has decreed that all Americans who voted for Donald Trump during the past thirty days be exiled from the country as of…. Pardon me, I understand we now have newly-elected President Oprah on the line from…..
Come to think of it, how much worse would that system be than what has actually happened to America over the past few of its antiquated “election cycles”?
