But with over half us democrats already voted in many places, feels like 5 pm on election day- All that’s left is the evening rush at the polls. We took full advantage of the early voting opportunities granted by law while the republicans trashed early voting, and now we’ve taken the lead and the republicans have barely a week to catch up. Good luck GOP, you’re gonna need it!
538 prognosticates that Biden has an 88% chance of winning and rates Trump’s chance of winning at only 3%, barely halfway to the traditional .05 threshold of statistical significance. Even the rigged against democracy Senate is leaning blue, with a 73% chance of a democratic majority, and the republicans are a permanent minority party in the people’s House of Representatives. The republicans only path to political control is gaming the system, and even that isn’t working anymore. Over at 270 to win every pundit’s map shows Biden winning and Princeton Elections Consortium predicts a Biden win with 356 electoral college votes. Here in Minnesota it’s all over except for the down ballot races, with 538 giving both Biden and Senator Tina Smith odds of victory in the low 90s percents.
But CD7 is definitely in play- 538 gives democrat Collin Peterson only a 23% chance of winning re-election in this R+12 district, I think the race is a lot closer. In the legislative races, despite the DFL environmental caucus’s attempts to end mining and probably logging too, SD5 shows signs of going democratic again. There’s no publicly available polling that far down ballot, but the democrat’s energy and enthusiasm is measurable- I was on a DFL phone bank this evening but had to bow out because my browser wasn’t compatible with the dialer, but it was incredible to watch the DFL phone bank callers blast through a list of thousands of calls in a couple hours. And while usually at one week out I’m thoroughly frustrated with the mismanagement of democratic campaigns, this cycle it’s hard to find fault with the strategy as we picked our candidate(s) and then adapted to the crisis of the worst pandemic we’ve seen in a century.
So it’s 5pm on election day and I’m feeling nervous but good… But we still have to insure all those democratic votes are counted, the peoples will is followed, and Trump and his thugs actually vacate the premises on inauguration day!
Sassy Democrat 