No matter what, the work is not done

Did everyone sleep well last night?

We’re getting busy on YouTube as polls close tonight. We will be live starting at 7:30 Eastern tonightfinishing . . . a little later than that. Marc Caputo will report from Trump HQ, as will Andrew from Base Kamala. We will have special guests rotating throughout the night.

You can straighten up Here now set yourself a reminder. Let’s all be together. Happy Election Day.

by William Kristol

After months of poring over every bit of polling data, pressing friends and colleagues for information, scrutinizing debate shows and television interviews, the last bit of wisdom I’ve been offered about this election it came from a fortune cookie.

Yesterday, I came across one on my kitchen counter — sitting alone, neglected and unopened. I opened it, only to find the most welcoming advice: “It’s time to take a break.”

A break! What a wonderful thought. How fitting a message for election day – the time when our exhaustion turns to anxiety as we wait for the results to come in.

But this is not the time for a break.

First, everyone needs to vote if they haven’t already. And everyone needs to get as many like-minded voters to the polls as possible. So no break until tonight.

And after that? Time for a break?

Sorry, the answer is still no.

Let us consider the two possible outcomes.

If Donald Trump wins tonight, I’ll be tempted to follow Abraham Lincoln’s advice in his 1855 letter to Joshua Speed: “When it comes down to it, I’d rather emigrate to a country where they don’t pretend to love liberty— in Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to Russia! Here at home, however, we will face a major, even daunting task. Over the next four years, we will have to rebuild a loyal opposition—loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to what America was and should be. We will have to organize to try to limit the damage Trump can do in a second term and lay the groundwork for a future recovery.

So it’s clear that if Trump wins, it won’t be the time to give up, no time to take more than a brief (well, maybe mid-length) break for a few stiff drinks. We will have to fortify ourselves by remembering the great admonition of the great John McCain: It’s always darkest before it turns black. Then back to the fight!

But what if Kamala Harris wins? Have a happy day! But even then, it won’t quite be time for a break. Doing so would be like successfully landing on D-Day and then deciding to take a few days off. It doesn’t work that way.

There is still too much work ahead. There is too much uncertainty ahead of us. There are too many questions that need answers.

Will Harris be a successful president? Will the Democratic Party become a truly responsible governing party, centrist or liberal in the broadest sense of the term? Can the Republican Party begin to find its way back out of the fetid quagmire it has sunk into? Can our political institutions be strengthened? Can our civic habits be restored? Can conspiracy theories be relegated to the margins of our national life? Can we once again learn to distinguish lies from truth? More concretely and immediately, can Ukraine win and Putin lose?

It could go on. There will be a lot to do. None of this will be easy. So, even if we emerge victorious tonight from the low and dishonest decade dominated by Donald Trump, we have a massive task of building and rebuilding ahead of us.

Not much time for a break, I’m afraid.

In the meantime, as we see the comebacks coming tonight, I recommend keeping in mind Churchill’s epigraph from his history of World War II, which he calls “the moral of the job:”

At War: Resolution

In defeat: defiance

In Victory: Magnanimity

In peace: Good will.

I have to say that resolution, defiance and good will seem fine. I’m not so sure I can achieve magnanimity personally. But you, dear reader, can lead the way, and I suppose that’s something to aspire to.

But first: victory.

by Andrew Egger

If Donald Trump loses tonight, it will be largely due to a stunning display of hubris.

We voters have remarkably short memories. Trump’s riots are quickly out of the news cycle. So when the dust settles, the vast majority of his tirades and indulgences simply won’t have made an impact.

The things at the beginning of the cycle might as well have happened before humans discovered fire. There may not be a voter in America still mad at Trump suggested Ron DeSantis was a pedophile early last year. But even fairly recent things are hard to remember. In August, a Trump staffer physically shoved a worker at Arlington National Cemetery who was trying to prevent them from using a particularly hallowed section of the grounds to shoot campaign footage. Even the army’s report on that incident, released late last monthit barely made a blip.

Like Jonathan Martin Put L: Absolute volume is the superpower. We don’t have time to talk about things like Jeffrey Epstein being recorded saying Trump is his friend, because we’re already on to the next one. Nothing has time to go to long-term storage.

In turn, we begin to mark it on a scale. All Trump had to do to maximize his chances at the end of this election was just keep his nose clean for a few weeks. Instead, he is crash landing on election day following some truly indefensible statements. Exist reason to believe cutting edge independents are drifting towards Kamala Harris; it’s not hard to see why.

Harris entered this contest — just three months ago! — with major structural disadvantages. He needed to pick up the pieces from a seriously unpopular incumbent who clung to the illusion that he could win again for far too long. She needed to overcome perceptions she had from her own failed presidential run that she was captured by the radical left and easy politics. He had to convince America that it was finally ready for a woman to be president, and a black woman at that.

We can analyze (and have analyzed!) about this or that strategic or tactical decision he has made since then. Perhaps he should have moved faster to distance himself from Biden’s record, or found a more creative way to direct his earlier attempts to woo the Bernie Bros. Certainly should have gone on joe rogan. But that’s what they are: whims. In a few months, Harris has accomplished a remarkable thing: He has united the anti-Trump coalition, kept the Democratic Party from getting impatient, and put himself in a position to win.

Around the world recently, this has simply not happened. The economic pain and escalating conflict that has rocked the globe in the wake of the pandemic has been unpalatable to whichever side happens to be in power holding the bag, the left. or correct. Harris looks to break that form tonight.

If Trump wins tonight, it will be largely because of the inexorable weight of that structural pressure. I kick out the bums from all over the world; maybe they will do it here too.

If Harris wins, it will be different. Her behavior on the trail will have made a significant difference. And so will Trump’s.

NOT SATISTICAL, BUT CORRECT: There’s not much that’s fun about tied picks with so much at stake. One thing that was a guilty pleasure, though: watching the election modelers as they try to get the public to accept that, well, the models show equal choice. What do you want him to do??

“I don’t know what else we can tell you” said Sean Trends of RealClearPolitics last night. Modelers are effectively 50-50. . . . Everything beyond that is vibe or, probably worse, anecdotes. No one should be trusted. I’m sorry. Trust me, as someone whose job it is to predict elections for a living, this hurt me more than it hurt you.”

Meanwhile, crystal ball types with unearned confidence on both sides are already training for victory laps. “Nate Silver’s polling is so unreliable he’s now saying whoever wins the presidency is lucky,” Allan Lichtman scoffed shortly after. tweeting AI art about himself as Star Trek Vulcan: “Mark my words. . . The keys will be right again!”

Silver, for what it’s worth drove his model last night. Out of 80,000 simulations, Harris won 40,012. you know what We like those odds.

ALWAYS THE ONES YOU EXPECT THE MOST: Well, screw us over with a feather. Amanda Moore writes in Political today that “a white nationalist worked on the Trump campaign in a top position in Pennsylvania for five months — until Friday, when the Pennsylvania GOP fired him after learning of his views from my reporting.”

The staff in question, Luke Meyer, hosts a podcast called ALEXANDRE with the noxious Richard Spencer, where he made some small suggestions for adjustments he would like to see in American public life: “Why can’t we make New York, for example, white again? Why can’t we liberate and reclaim Miami? I’m not saying we have to be 100% homogeneous. I’m not saying we have to be North Korea or Japan or anything like that. A return to 80 percent, 90 percent white would probably be the best we could hope for, to some degree.”

Meyer may be fired, but he’s confident he’ll be back. “Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly emerge and work in the shadows,” he told Moore in an email.

We wish we were more confident that he is wrong!

“IT WILL NOT BE EASY FOR THEM”: On our Bulwark+ live stream last night, our friend Will Saletan gave us all a bit of a laugh for stressing too much about how Trump might try to overturn the election when we have no reason to believe he – still lost. Let’s go win first and cross that bridge when we get to it, was his idea.

You know what: right! But we’ll still take a moment to comfort extremism researcher Jared Holt: “As much planning has gone into the political right to participate in this election, there’s been so much work by everyone, from civil society to parliamentarians, to anticipate. and prepare for this threat,” he said The raw story yesterday. “Even if they could be more organized and firmer going into this election, I don’t think it will be a cake walk for them. There were a lot of people working to defend the process.”

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Chiring!