People should not have to worry so much about this. But when you have the president of the United States tweeting out things like this…
Law Enforcement has been strongly notified to watch closely for any ILLEGAL VOTING which may take place in Tuesday’s Election (or Early Voting). Anyone caught will be subject to the Maximum Criminal Penalties allowed by law. Thank you!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 5, 2018
Via CNN:
Even if your state doesn’t require an ID to vote, it’s best to bring one if you have one. Being over-prepared is just another layer of protection against voter suppression.
Remember that, most likely, you are LEGALLY ALLOWED to vote
What if you are told your registration didn’t go through, or you don’t have the required documents? Even if your registration is pending or your voter application has been wrongly purged, you are still allowed to vote.
According to the ACLU, if your qualifications are challenged, some states will have you sign a sworn statement that you satisfy your state’s requirements and allow you to cast a regular ballot.
Or, if you did forget your ID at home or have been removed from the registration system, you can cast a provisional ballot — a right all voters are entitled to by federal law.
If an individual declares that such individual is a registered voter in the jurisdiction in which the individual desires to vote and that the individual is eligible to vote in an election for Federal office, but the name of the individual does not appear on the official list of eligible voters for the polling place or an election official asserts that the individual is not eligible to vote, such individual shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot…
§15482, CHAPTER 146, TITLE 42 OF THE 2009 UNITED STATES CODE
However, you’re going to need to be your biggest advocate when it comes to provisional ballots: These ballots are typically kept separately from all other ballots, so make sure to follow up with your local elected officials to confirm they have looked into your qualifications and have counted the vote.
If you’re aggressively being questioned about your right to cast a vote, you can calmly and clearly state you are exercising your legal right to vote. Report the behavior to other poll workers and peacefully communicate your intent. You should also report such incidents to election hotlines or local and state officials as voter intimidation. You have a few options:
Call a state or local election hotline to report any problems you’re having with the voting process.
Call the Department of Justice voting rights hotline (1-800-253-3931) if you think your rights have been violated
Democrats are expected to be good winners. After a Democratic win, the media will ask the Democrats about their plans to reach across the aisle when they arrive in congress. The media will question Democrats on how they will “unite the country,” as if they were the ones working 24/7 to divide it. They will ask about–and expect–bipartisanship going forward. Many Democrats will fall for this framing from the media. I understand. They want to be uniters, not dividers.
Democrats are expected to forgive and forget how Republicans did nothing while our highest values were trampled on by Trump.
Even if an opponent lied about health care and supported hateful and violent rhetoric from Trump, Democrats are expected to forgive and forget. They will talk about being a representative for all the people in the district, not just the people who voted for them, because that is what you are supposed to say as a good winner.
Red and Blue Being Good Sports. AP photo CBS News
Democrats are expected to be good losers. They aren’t supposed to demand investigations of voter suppression, hacking and campaign election fraud. There will be pressure to conceded rather than fight the results. The mainstream media, Republicans and some centrist Democrats will want Democrats to concede –even when there isn’t an overwhelmingly clear winner or loser!
Howie Klein said the other day that many Democrats have to win by 6-8 points because of the gerrymandering and voter suppression. That’s insane.
But here’s the deal. Democrats don’t have to be good losers. We can be suspicious about all results that weren’t projected blowouts for the Republicans. We SHOULD be suspicious. If the shoe is on the other foot this evening Republicans will be demanding investigations.
Democrats don’t have to be good winners. We can be winners who don’t forget about the bad things that happened. I want winners who will change things so the people who follow them can have fair elections.
If there isn’t punishment for abuses of power and law breaking in our system the problems continue. That is what happens when we only“look forward not backward” after a win. If we don’t investigate and prosecute the people involved, the problems never stop.
Some problems, like breaking norms that weren’t laws (e.g. disclosing taxes) need to be made into laws.
Democrats don’t want to be like Red Hats at a Trump rally, mindlessly screaming ‘Lock him up!’ about their opponents. We actually do believe in the rule of law and the assumption of innocence until proven guilty. But what if their opponents actually committed crimes?
We need a chant that assumes innocent until proven guilty. Something that applies to both real and false allegations of wrong doings. How about:
“A Full Investigation Means Justice For The Nation!” (Nah, too many syllables, but at least it rhymes.)
Full investigations take time. People have short attention spans. Our people won’t be in office until January. The good news, if you can call it that, is that Trump and his people will continue with their violent rhetoric, law breaking and lying every single day, win or lose.
As Sam Sedersaid, the Trump fever won’t break if they lose. They didn’t relax when they won. They are angry winners because they knew they didn’t really deserve it. When they lose they will scream and cry like Trump. Everyone will be to blame but themselves. It will all be so very very unfair.
In The Squire of Gothos a powerful child-like being was punished by his parents who then apologized to the crew for the damage he had done. When his parents took him away he whined, “But why? I didn’t do anything wrong. I was winning, I was winning! You saw!” Sound like anyone you see on TV?
Post election we need to stay vigilant and keep track of people to investigate.
Newly elected Democrats will need to hold various members of the GOP accountable for their role in enabling this dangerous child with power. This includes holding people accountable who knew about various crimes, had the power to stop them, but didn’t.
Finally, we can’t let law-breaking, resigning Republicans fly off onto Lobbying World free as a bird. Yes, I’m alleging Republicans broke the law. I know of six Republicans who broke campaign finance laws in connection with money they got from the NRA that was really from Russia. Which specific laws they broke and how much they knew is still unclear, but that is why we need investigations.
Win or lose the GOP will continue to damage to the country until they are prosecuted for their crimes. Mueller’s findings will push Trump into new levels of craziness between now and January. Get ready to demand full investigations.
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Monday morning, Cook’s Political Report moved nine seats towards Democrats:
A “Red Exodus” is contributing to the potential “Blue Wave:” of Republicans’ 41 open seats, 15 are rated as Toss Ups or worse, and another five are only in Lean Republican.
Just by winning all of the races at least “leaning” their way, Democrats would net 16 of the 23 seats they need for a majority. In that scenario, Democrats would only need to win eight of the 30 races in Toss Up to win control (they currently hold one Toss Up, Minnesota’s 1st CD). Conversely, Republicans would likely need to win 23 of the 30 Toss Up races to keep their majority. That’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult.
The shift is another indication Democrats have the edge they need to retake the U.S. House. FiveThirtyEight sees a 1 in 5 chance Democrats will win control of the U.S. Senate.
NEW at @CookPolitical: 10 final House rating changes. Biggest moves are towards Dems:#FL25: Diaz-Balart (R) – Likely R to Lean R#GA06: Handel (R) – Lean R to Toss Up#MI06: Upton (R) – Likely R to Lean R#PA10: Perry (R) – Lean R to Toss Up#WA08: OPEN (R) – Toss Up to Lean D— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 5, 2018
The New York Times’ Upshot finds a 3-point move towards Democrats since its September baseline numbers.
Nate Silver responded, “This is the single most terrifying bit of poll-related data for Republicans, in that Democrats made gains in a pretty diverse array of districts, which might lead one to wonder what’s happening in the districts that *haven’t* been polled recently.”
As filmmaker Michael Moore reminds all who will listen:
IGNORE THE POLLSTERS! In this week's NY Times/Siena poll of the Senate race in Texas they reached out to 51,983 Texans. Only 800 gave them an answer! And of the 7,219 young voters (18-29 yrs old) they "polled", only 66 responded! Polls are wrong! Keep working & making calls!— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) November 4, 2018
As we saw yesterday, the youth votes in several key states is breaking records. They are not being captured in the polls.
Democracy itself is on the line. Perhaps not only just in this country. Your actions today matter.
People on the sidewalk, at a birthday party, at the grocery store, etc., have asked my take on what will happen tonight. Nobody has seen a mid-term election quite like this. Early voting is at near-presidential levels. Will Beto win? Will Stacey? I tell them I don’t know. But I do know whatever the outcome those who work hard today to get out the vote will not feel like road kill tonight. They might even feel they helped save the world.
This piece from Roger Angell of the New Yorker says it all. If he can do it, we can all do it.
Back in 1992, I published a piece about voting at the Y on Lexington Avenue. “At the Y, nothing has changed,” I wrote:
Around the room, the machines’ shabby curtains snap open and bang shut; the vestal poll-watchers bend low over their thick volumes; and once again I have forgotten the number of my assembly district. Redirected, I sign my name above an amazing column of perfect prior replicas, in various inks: my straight A’s in civics. I get in line and, for this once, don’t mind its length or slowness. Inside at last, I flip the pleasing levers and then check my “X”s one more time; it’s all done so quickly that I linger a moment longer. . . . Then I grab the lever, record myself with a manly fling, and walk out, shriven, to go to work.
I went on to say that I’d fallen “a long way from the hot certainties of my twenties and thirties, when I would argue politics with my friends and family by the hour and the day and the night,” and fired off “burning letters to my congressman and dialled Western Union before bedtime with still another telegram to the White House. No more. I have no wish to sort out here what happened to me, what happened to us all, when our politics went onto the tube, for we know that story by heart. We are consumers of politics now, and hardly participants at all.”
Editing this piece now, before your eyes, I’d say that I like and stand behind my paean to the voting machine, whose absence I mourn each November—the pure and pearl-like oddity that so well matched the strangeness and beauty of voting. On the other hand, I could do without my hurried complaints about the massive shift of national politics from newspapers and radio onto television (the “tube,” as we called it then).
What I need to add here, in 2018, by contrast, is my reconversion from the distanced and gentlemanly 1992 Roger to something akin to the argumentative and impassioned younger me, which began with the arrival of Donald Trump in our politics and our daily lives. In a New Yorker piece posted the week before the 2016 election, I wrote that my first Presidential vote was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1944, when I was a young Air Force sergeant stationed in the Central Pacific. I went on to say that, seventy-two years later, defeating Trump made that immediate election the most important of my life. Alarmed as I was, I had no idea, of course, of the depths of the disaster that would befall us, taking away our leadership and moral standing in the world.
I am ninety-eight now, legally blind, and a pain in the ass to all my friends and much of my family with my constant rantings about the Trump debacle—his floods of lies, his racism, his abandonment of vital connections to ancient allies and critically urgent world concerns, his relentless attacks on the media, and, just lately, his arrant fearmongering about the agonizingly slow approach of a fading column of frightened Central American refugees. The not-to-mention list takes us to his scorn for the poor everywhere, his dismantling contempt for the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and his broad ignorance and overriding failure of human response. A Democratic victory in this midterm election, in the House, at the least, will put a halt to a lot of this and prevent something much worse.
Countless friends of mine have been engaged this year in political action, but, at my age, I’m not quite up to making phone calls or ringing doorbells. But I can still vote, and I ended that 1992 piece by saying how the morning after Election Day I’d search out, in the Times, the totals in the Presidential balloting, and, “over to the right in my candidate’s column, count the millions of votes there, down to the very last number. ‘That’s me!’ ” I would whisper, “and, at the moment, perhaps feel once again the absurd conviction that that final number, the starboard digit, is something—go figure—I would still die for, if anyone cared.”
What I said I would die for I now want to live for. The quarter-century-plus since George H. W. Bush lost that election to Bill Clinton has brought a near-total change to our everyday world. Unendable wars, desperate refugee populations, a crashing climate, and a sickening flow of gun murders and massacres in schools, concert halls, churches, and temples are the abiding commonplace amid the buzz of social media, Obamacare, and #MeToo. What remains, still in place and now again before us, is voting.
What we can all do at this moment is vote—get up, brush our teeth, go to the polling place, and get in line. I was never in combat as a soldier, but now I am. Those of you who haven’t quite been getting to your polling place lately, who want better candidates or a clearer system of making yourself heard, or who just aren’t in the habit, need to get it done this time around. If you stay home, count yourself among the hundreds of thousands now being disenfranchised by the relentless parade of restrictions that Republicans everywhere are imposing and enforcing. If you don’t vote, they have won, and you are a captive, one of their prizes.
When you do go to vote on Tuesday, take a friend, a nephew, a neighbor, or a partner, and be patient when in line. Just up ahead of you, the old guy in a sailing cap, leaning on his cane and accompanied by his wife, is me, again not minding the wait, and again enthralled by the moment and its meaning.
Roger Angell, a senior editor and a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorkersince 1944, and became a fiction editor in 1956.
According to this CNN poll, 70% of voters say they are sending a message to Donald Trump: 42% in opposition to him and 28% in support.
Among women, 50% are voting to send a message in opposition to Trump and 25% are in support with the rest saying he has no effect on their vote.
The gender gap cuts across lines of race and education, with non-white women (79% favor Democrats) and white women with college degrees (68% back the Democrat) breaking most heavily for the Democrats, while white men (57% Republican) and particularly white men without college degrees (65% back the Republican) are most deeply behind the GOP.
Trump has been saying at every rally that a vote for a Republican is a vote for him. It’s true. That’s what this is about, when you get right down to it. 70% of voters agree.
So the result tomorrow is all about him and the sycophantic toadies who have kissed his feet. They own it.
NEW: “We have a lot of ads,” Pres. Trump says when asked about controversy over anti-immigration ad. “They certainly are effective, based on the numbers that we’re seeing.”
“A lot of things are offensive,” he says on criticism that ad is offensive. “Your questions are offensive” pic.twitter.com/rAElL01ST6
Sean Hannity and Fox News asserted Monday that he wasn’t going to be on stage “campaigning” with President Donald Trump at a political rally the day before Election Day — perhaps leading readers to believe he hasn’t endorsed, campaigned for or appeared on stage with GOP candidates for office and other politicians in recent years.
But the television and radio personality has repeatedly made clear that he sees himself as both a partisan operator and a media presence, endorsing and appearing with candidates for office over and over again.
Here’s a brief timeline of Hannity’s most prominent political endorsements and appearances in recent years:
On March 11, 2016, Hannity interviewed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, at a rally in Orlando. The Orlando Sentinel recorded the event and reported: “GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz, interviews with TV-host Sean Hannity during a rally at the Faith Assembly of God church, in Orlando, Fla.” Cruz and Hannity appeared together at several campaign events in 2016, including one in February at which Hannity looked on as Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) endorsed Cruz on stage.
ORLANDO, FL – MARCH 11: Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks in a discussion with political commentator Sean Hannity during a campaign rally at Faith Assembly of God Church on March 11, 2016 in Orlando, Florida. The candidates continue to campaign before the March 15th Florida primary. (Photo by Gerardo Mora/Getty Images)
On March 18, 2016, Hannity interviewed Cruz again, this time in Arizona. Hannity aired the interview footage on his show but noted, referring to members of the audience holding “CHOOSE CRUZ” signs: “They’re here for an event that was put together by the super PAC Keep the Promise.” Cruz and Hannity spoke against a backdrop of “CHOOSE CRUZ” and “KEEP THE PROMISE” logos.
On Sept. 26, 2016, Hannity appeared in a Donald Trump campaign video, apparently without telling his bosses at Fox News ahead of time. “We were not aware of Sean Hannity participating in a promotional video and he will not be doing anything along these lines for the remainder of the election season,” a Fox spokesperson told TPM at the time.
On June 26, 2018, Hannity headlined the 2018 Manhattan GOP Freedom Gala “in support of Chele Farley for U.S. Senate,” according to Farley’s campaign. Farley’s campaign made Hannity’s political involvement explicit: “With the federal filing deadline approaching, Hannity and the Manhattan GOP are helping to cap a strong fundraising quarter for Farley in her bid to unseat the Senate’s top obstructionist and 2020 presidential poser Kirsten Gillibrand.”
On Sept. 20, 2018, Hannity interviewed Trump ahead of a campaign rally in Las Vegas. He autographed “Make America Great Again” hats and threw them to fans. “I know this crowd— You ready to hear the President?” he asked rally attendees, to cheers.
Of course he’s campaigning with the president today. Everyone knows it. It’s absurd to even pretend otherwise. He is the president’s most important supporter and one of his most influential advisers. We can see that every single night.
In September of 2017, Governor Scott Walker, Republican of Wisconsin, signed a contract that would make his state the home of the first U.S. factory of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. The company, which is based in Taiwan and makes products for Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, among others, would build a 21.5-million-square-foot manufacturing campus, invest up to ten billion dollars in Wisconsin, and hire as many as thirteen thousand workers at an average wage of fifty-four thousand dollars a year. For Walker, whose approval had fallen to the mid-thirties after his aborted Presidential run, the deal was seen as a crucial boost to his reëlection prospects. “The Foxconn initiative looked like something that could be a hallmark of Walker’s reëlection campaign,” Charles Franklin, a professor and pollster at Marquette University Law School, told me. “He could claim a major new manufacturing presence, one that would also employ blue-collar workers in a region where blue-collar jobs are more scarce than they used to be.”
The idea of putting the plant in southeastern Wisconsin originated in April of 2017, during a helicopter ride President Donald Trump took with Reince Priebus, a Wisconsin native and Trump’s chief of staff at the time. Flying over Kenosha, Priebus’s home town, they passed the empty lot that once held the American Motors Corporation plant. “Why is all that land vacant?” Trump asked, according to an account Priebus gave to a Milwaukee television station. “That land should be used.” When Terry Gou, Foxconn’s chairman, came to the White House to discuss Foxconn’s desire to build a U.S. factory, Trump suggested the site in Kenosha. It wasn’t big enough, but the town of Mt. Pleasant, fifteen miles north, pursued the company aggressively, and was ultimately selected by Foxconn in October of 2017.
The project moved quickly. Last June, a groundbreaking ceremony was held in Mt. Pleasant to celebrate a political triumph for Trump and Walker. After depositing a couple scoops of earth with a gold-plated shovel, Trump called Foxconn’s future campus “the eighth wonder of the world” and hinted that its promise of well-paying manufacturing jobs could be a model for other states in the Midwest, which were, like Wisconsin, crucial to Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory in the 2016 election. “I recommended Wisconsin, in this case,” Trump said. “And I’ll be recommending Ohio, and I’ll be recommending Pennsylvania, and I’ll be recommending Iowa.”
But as the public has become aware of the spiralling costs for these jobs, the Foxconn deal has become something of a political liability for Walker, particularly among voters outside of southeastern Wisconsin. Those costs include taxpayer subsidies to the company totalling more than $4.5 billion, the largest subsidy for a foreign corporation in American history. Since Wisconsin already exempts manufacturing companies from paying taxes, Foxconn, which generated a hundred and fifty-eight billion dollars in revenue last year, will receive much of this subsidy in direct cash payments from taxpayers. Depending on how many jobs are actually created, taxpayers will be paying between two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and more than a million dollars per job. According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a nonpartisan agency that provides economic analysis to the Wisconsin state legislature, the earliest citizens might see a return on their Foxconn investment is in 2042.
Walker is in trouble and this has a lot to do with why. No one should be surprised. He ran through tens of millions in donations for his presidential race before the primaries even started, and he was the first one to drop out. “Fiscal responsibility” isn’t his strong suit.
I can’t tell you how happy it will make me to see this guy defeated.
On the Monday before the election two years ago, Democrats were merrily laying in their bottles of champagne for the inevitable Tuesday celebration. It had been the weirdest campaign in memory, maybe all of history, with the first woman nominee facing a bizarre unfiltered celebrity who might as well have landed from outer space. Everyone was optimistic, even a little bit wired from the overdose of surreality, and anxious to get back to normal.
I had my morning-after Salon column almost entirely written before the returns came in. Having watched nearly all of his speeches and rallies and seeing the effect he had on his followers, I was concerned about what Trump had stirred up. But nonetheless, I too succumbed to certainty in the last days even though I could see that the polls were uncomfortably close. It was hard not to. Being a generally positive, rational person it simply seemed impossible that the United States of America would elect this unqualified demagogue to the most important job in the world.
Democratic voters reeled for a while, but nobody withdrew to their corners to feel sorry for themselves for long. Gobsmacked by this unthinkable result, people decided to resist this extremist president and soon picked themselves up and took to the streets, created organizations, convened meetings, donated money and filed to run for office. This surge of political involvement started immediately after the election and has continued at full steam ever since. It has been impressive.
The final polls show Democrats probably with at least the edge they need to take over the majority in the House, which was always the primary goal. The Senate map was always daunting so I don’t think anyone placed their hopes there. But they didn’t need to — one House of Congress can stop the GOP agenda in its tracks and provide the oversight that the president’s accomplices in the current Congress have refused to provide. So, one would think that the Democrats would be cautiously optimistic and somewhat energized, knowing that their hard work stands a good chance of paying off tomorrow night.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know even one person who feels anything but anxiety. Every Democratic voter I see around me, in real life, on social media and television is a nervous wreck. Saturday Night Live caught the vibe perfectly with a skit last Saturday:
According to a a poll conducted by YouGov the political environment is making Democrats so apprehensive that they are 50 percent more likely than Republicans to say they’re “eating their feelings” meaning they are pigging out from stress. They report they are also drinking more at a 2-to-1 ratio to their GOP counterparts and working out excessively, which isn’t necessarily healthy either. NBC news reported:
“I’m seeing some people so stressed at the moment they’re doing two, even three soul cycle classes at day,” Dr. Navya Mysore, a primary care doctor, tells NBC News BETTER. “Exercise is good for you, but too much is not. You [risk] dehydration and your body needs time to rest and rejuvenate.”
Meanwhile, therapists are treating what some are calling “Trump anxiety disorder” among people who are alarmed by the president’s doomsday rhetoric, such as this one from last July:
To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
(Trump voters are upset too, mostly because of liberals’ dislike of their president, which I examined in this Salon piece right after the 2016 election.)
It’s natural for Democrats to be fretful about the election after the trauma of the Donald Trump upset. Nobody wants to make the mistake of ever being so sure of themselves again and have to deal with the PTSD that followed. And with all the shennanigans around vote suppression and foreign interference and structural imbalance that makes it necessary for Democrats to have millions of more votes just to eke out a small win, you’d be a fool to take anything for granted.
Wanting to put a check on Trump is the only rational response to what we’ve seen over the past two years. From defending Neo-Nazis and sundry right wing crazies to destroying the global framework that’s kept the world from catastrophic war for 70 years to rampant corruption and cozying up to the world’s worst authoritarian dictators, it’s been a living nightmare every single day. The non-stop reflexive lying and bragging and blaming alone is enough to drive you crazy.
But even with all that, as terrible as it is, I don’t believe it’s the whole story. I think people are also anxious and fearful about this election because it will tell us, once and for all, how many of our fellow Americans have truly bought into this madness.
I think we all assume that in 2016 there were Trump voters who simply couldn’t stand Clinton and while they knew Trump was appalling, they just couldn’t pull the lever for her. And it’s fair to conclude that there were quite a few Republicans and Independents who thought his campaign persona was just an act, that he’d become presidential once in office. The press certainly did.
What I think has many of us especially frightened is that we are seeing huge turnout for a midterm election, possibly even hitting presidential levels when all the votes are counted. And we don’t know if that huge surge means more of us or more of them.
The polls show that these races are very close! What if these past two years of Trump haven’t opened more people’s eyes to his unfitness for the office but have actually persuaded many of those formerly reluctant Trump voters that his act is a winner? How can we be sure there aren’t new voters out there who believe that his terrible, horrible, very bad presidency really is the triumph he says it is? It’s terrifying to contemplate.
That’s what wakes me up at night with a start from a dream in which the whole country is a sea of red MAGA hats and the blue wave is just a trickle on the margins. A little neurotic? Maybe. But when you see those ecstatic cult-of-personality rallies and remember that they currently control all three branches of government, it’s not insane to worry. Let’s just hope that after tomorrow, we can finally find some peace.
Oh what am I saying? No matter what happens, Donald Trump will still be president. But maybe we will get to feel a little better that he isn’t taking even more of the country all the way down the rabbit hole.
