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I'd intended to make an election post earlier this weekend but ended up spending time with friends/family and "touching grass" instead, but I also want to get something out before tomorrow. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) has labeled 2024 "Schrodinger's Election" and I feel it. I look around my purple but leaning blue suburb and Trump Flags, bumper stickers, and yard-signs seem to outnumber Harris ones by a solid two to one margin and are often seen coexisting with more liberal municipal/state candidates and "vote yes/no on [thing]". My intuition is that Trump has this in the bag. But I also know that if history is any guide, my intuition is probably wrong as I thought the same back in 2020. I wouldn't call myself "an election denier" but I do have a sneaking suspicion that an honest accounting in 2020 would've resulted in either a Trump victory or a much tighter race for similar reasons to those that @Tractatus lays out in this post here. As such I find myself approaching the current election with a certain amount of trepidation, I think that support for Trump is much thicker on the ground than it is for Harris, but I also think that whatever "fortification" efforts that are in place now will be far more mature and firmly established than they were 4 years ago.
I am predicting a resounding "win" for Harris, but that win is in quotation marks for a reason.
My alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory is that the reason the media has suddenly started to give questions about voter-rolls airtime is that it's "battle space preparation" so that in the event of a Trump win all the commentators who've spent the last 4 years prattling on about "the Jan 6th Insurrection" and how there was no proof of election fraud, can pivot to "questioning election results is the mark of a true patriot" without suffering fatal amounts of cognitive whiplash.
I’m expecting precisely nobody to accept the results. Baked in. One side believes the election was stolen, both believe the election is being stolen now (they differ on methods and direction, but in both cases, it’s against them). One side believes the other is Nazis. The other side believes that the others are communists.
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