The End Game
I’m sitting here tonight not watching a movie as is my habit. Instead, I am still watching MSNBC as we head towards 8pm. The election night music is becoming very familiar to me and watching Steve Kornacki tally and project votes seems like a normal thing for us. I can’t say I like watching county-by-county voting results for Georgia or any other state for that matter. That seems like a level of detail with which I shouldn’t be involved. I don’t really care about Georgia that much even though I have nothing against the state. But this year we have no choice since the fate of our effective governance capability over at least the next two, if not four years is at stake. Right now we are waiting for a significant update of some 200,000 votes from Dekalb county, which seems to hold the key as to whether the two Democratic contenders, Warnock and Ossoff can get that late urban bounce they need to overtake Purdue and Loeffler. The numbers seem to favor a big enough bounce to take the blue candidates to victory. We will see in the next few hours.
Meanwhile, Trump and Pence seem to have squared off against one another over whether Pence will try to exert what little role he has in the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote process. Pence seems unwilling to bow this one last time to Trump’s will as he has for five years. Instead, he has been convinced that his future in the Republican Party may suffer if he makes this goal line stand for Trump. Trump clearly expects that sort of “loyalty” to him even though he holds no such loyalty standard himself towards anyone else. That is the mantra of the narcissist. Process and Democracy be damned, to Donald Trump it is all about hanging on to the last shred of hope for salvation like a cat on a curtain. Doing anything and everything to deny that he is what he fears being more than anything, a loser. I honestly think he does not realize that his very actions around this display of desperation has already defined him as a massive loser to many of us. Indeed, that list of people who feel that way grows larger every day as more and more Republican lawmakers see the liability with hitching their wagons to that falling star.
One of my most loyally red friends is actually in Atlanta acting as a Republican voting observer, as he has put it to me, to watch for voter fraud, the presumption of all Republicans it seems when they lose this election this year. Needless to say, they do not claim fraud when they win. I’ve checked in with this friend tonight and he has told me that he is acting as an official observer in Fulton County (downtown Atlanta). He has said that he has not been allowed within the required 25 feet of the vote counters and that while he has no proof, he has a deep suspicion that there was fraud. So, I am getting a real-time on-the-ground report from a Republican friend that reads 100% identically to the entire Trump playbook. Claim fraud without any proof even though you have been onsite to witness anything untoward, if it were to exist. My comment to that friend is that the Head of the Election Commission, the Secretary of State and the Governor of Georgia are all loyal Republicans who openly claim to have voted for and financially supported Trump, and yet they have clearly stood by the righteousness of the Georgia election results and have decried Trump’s claims as unfounded. I asked my friend how he felt he could claim fraud when his own team was manning the operating control positions of the election process in the state? He said he tried to contact those three officials and was unable to get through. In other words, he has said in so many words that he does not trust his own teammates. I have rarely heard such desperate reaching for rationalizations. My comment to him at the end of our texting was to remind him that knowing how to be a gracious loser was something we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten. That comment put an end to our texting for the evening. Denial is a very demanding bitch.
My friend Steve, who I would characterize as like-minded, texted me frantically early in the evening asking how he could follow the election results since the big traditional networks were not giving him live coverage. I suggested MSNBC, but apparently he doesn’t pay for cable and thus could only get MSNBC for their trial 10 minutes or so. While he desperately looked for another source of live information we went through You-Tube, NPR and all manner of sources in his desperation. Finally he settled on the Washington Post with its updates every 2-3 minutes. I must admit that in all my 67 years I have never watched a single state’s election results with so much minute-by-minute angst. We are now sitting with 98% of the vote in and a 35k positive margin for Warnock and a 3k negative deficit for Ossoff with the vast bulk of the remaining 2% of the vote coming from Dekalb County, a decidedly Democratic county with over 80% leaning to the left. With 90k votes (more or less) to be counted, even if only 60% is from Dekalb, the 80% edge means Ossoff should gain something like 30k votes and thereby overcome his opponent, David Purdue. If that happens and Ossoff and Warnock prevail and survive the inevitable recount, they will turn the Senate into a Democratically controlled body and give Biden and Harris a real shot at transformative change that we as a country desperately need to both make up for the regression during the MAGA years and move this country more in the direction it needs to move to get the social justice configuration where it must be.
Watching the updates after a commercial is like watching the end of a thriller movie. Ossoff is now only less than 2k out. What I am prepared for now is the next round of Republican claims of fraud and rigged elections. Expect it, its inevitable.
The end game of this process does not end tonight by any means. I suspect that this will be another case of this being election week rather than day for Georgia, but I believe the results will hold up in favor of both Democrats. It will be interesting to see how Mitch McConnell handles being unseated as the majority leader of the Senate, the Grim Reaper of all things judicial. My guess is that he is of an age that staying as minority head of the Senate may not be his cup of tea, but who knows. Republicans are very shrewd and my guess is that they all have a game plan for the outcome of the end game that doesn’t go their way. For all the false bravado of Donald Trump, Mitch is a realist’s realist and he undoubtedly has a Plan B ready to go. When you are the Grim Reaper you know you have a limited coterie of friends waiting to console you, you also know what the pack of dogs is capable of when the alpha dog gets a sprain. Mitch is the guy who has a last bullet in his gun at all times and the end game question is simply whether that bullet has his name on it or is initialed for DJT.