Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Kara Swisher is one of the most astute observers and chroniclers of the tech revolution and politics. Her experience makes her particularly valuable at this moment because she knows all the tech bros who are now going to be in the inner circle of the highest office in the land.

She wrote this today on threads:

I got some kind of 24 hour bug and fell asleep early last night with a headache & slight fever and woke feeling better but to these truly heinous results. Obviously, a shock, given the blatantly misogyny, homophobia/anti trans, racist & anti-immigrant messaging. But unhappiness with the economy & an ennui with the general US direction prevailed. @profgalloway & I were wrong to believe in the kinder nature of Americans. Some short observations:

1. We still don’t have to like it at all.

2. The other side will not be magnanimous in victory at all. Too many of them are the people you think they are, so no need to try to reach across the aisle & hope for the best unless you want to. (I hear their caterwauling, but not me!)

3. This is the red wave we were all dreading, just a few years later. It’s not clear yet what the mandate is — my guess is that it is economic and immigration issues rather than the truly bent ideas — but it is a mandate nonetheless, given how widespread it is.

4. You may be tired & heartbroken, but that does not mean we can rest for long. The world spins forward in the end has always been my mantra, proven time and again, even if it goes backward at times in its long history (this is def backwards).

5. Thank you to all the anti-Trumpers who warned us all whom we have let down and who are now adrift for a very long time. We are all in danger in some way, but they will bear the first ugly blows that are doubtlessly coming. Continue to support them.

6. Do not engage in conspiracy tactics and disinformation as attractive as they are. They won across the country clearly because their messages resonated and were able to tap into an existing dark vein of the American psyche that has always been there. Hope works. So does fear. As I say about tech: Enragement equals engagement.

7. This still remains a divided county & that means something. Most of these splits are close to 50-50. You are not alone even if it feels like it. Don’t cooperate.

8. Tech companies, especially social media, along with gerrymandering & Rupert Murdoch’s angry, cynical news outlets, have combined to bring us here. Tech leaders abrogated their responsibilities to ensure safety on their platforms & regulators did too. This is media unfettered in a way that will be studied decades from now. They were handmaidens to sedition on 1/6 and are now just willing bystanders more interested in profits than anything, as I have long asserted. It was capitalism after all.

10. Musk will merge X with Truth Social & take it public to benefit him and Trump. It is still a shitty business but a powerful propaganda organ. He bought it for this reason & will continue to use it in that way since the $44 billion he spent will yield trillions.

11. Musk is vindictive & loud, but he and Trump will inevitably war. Two malignant narcissists cannot occupy the same space for long. The person I would zero in on is the quieter (but not quiet) Peter Thiel, the true mastermind.

12. Thiel was the one who first saw the awful vehicle that is Trump and now Vance, who is also the one to watch (and Trump now needs to watch his back too as his usefullness will diminish). Thiel has bought himself a government for very little and will use it to further his many troubled theories. All the second bananas around the erratic Musk are via disciplined Thiel. Go read his books to understand as he has spelled it out clearly.

13. They will try to bring everyone to heel via their now massive power. Again, we don’t have to like it or cooperate. They won through tapping into rancor and selfishness. Fine. So be difficult. Say no. Resist. Don’t feel the need to be nice. In fact, be disrespectful. Lose people who tell you to accept this. It’s okay to be angry and fed up and disappointed. In fact, it’s required.

14. We can and will win again in what is a dark moment for progressives. The lives of our children depend on it.

15. Kamala Harris conducted a really impressive campaign, so don’t pillory her. She got us to close to even and we owe her our respect and gratitude.

16. Lastly, the Swishkatz family has your back. We are not going away and we will not be quiet. In fact, we like our odds and now we know the stakes. Today was a major Thanos loss, for sure, but you need to get up again and fight. I know we can do this all day. And we will.

I’m too tired from lack of sleep to feel inspired to go out and do anything right now. But I’ll gather myself up as I’ve done before and carry on as best I can. It’s not in my nature to just back off or back down.

I think her observations about Musk, Thiel and Vance are important. These are people with massive influence both because of their huge fortunes and their new proximity to power. I think she’s probably right about Musk and Trump inevitably locking horns. They’re both unstable narcissists who will not be able to work together for long.

Thiel and his creature JD Vance are more interesting. I have not done a full study of Thiel but I will take it up as soon as I have the energy. These people want to fundamentally re-order society and not in a good way.

For instance:

In another bow to Peter Thiel and the weird Network State tech cult, Donald Trump’s campaign platform has a plan to create new charter cities (so-called “Freedom Cities“) on federal land. It’s a clear indicator of his willingness to sell out the country to his far right Silicon Valley benefactors. In fact, Thiel and Marc Andreessen are funding an entire company – Pronomos Capital – dedicated to building such futuristic tech cities around the world.

“Kamala has nothing like this on her website,” declared Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini on Twitter yesterday. His post included text from Trump’s campaign website that promises to build “Freedom Cities“:

President Trump will work to open up the American Frontier, holding a contest to charter new cities where families and individuals can have a new shot of the American Dream.

The Network State cult, a frequent subject of this newsletter, calls for the creation of private cities ruled by non-democratic tech governments. “Freedom Cities” seems like a slight Republican rebranding of the concept. The adoption of the idea suggests that Trump’s team – which announced the plan last year – has been searching for ways to align with Weird Tech for quite some time.

If you’re interested, click that link. It spells it all out. It sounds looney but these guys have more money than god and have now seized political power.

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I’m sorry to be sharing so many pertinent quotes today but it’s about all I’ve got the energy for. If the shoe fits…

James Fallows has a good piece today which I don’t think he’ll mind my sharing in full:

This time, it was not a fluke.

When Donald Trump came to power eight years ago, there were countless what-ifs. What if James Comey had held his tongue? What if Clinton campaign emails, hacked by Russian operatives, had not been published on WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood video came out? (And distract attention from “Grab ‘em by…”) What if Clinton emails had not been such a media obsession? What if cable outlets had not found Trump rallies such useful audience draws? What if the US had joined every other democracy on Earth in choosing leaders without the bizarre Electoral College? What if everyone including Donald Trump himself had not taken it for granted that Hillary Clinton would win, and given her tougher scrutiny accordingly?

What if, what if.

This time we don’t have that distraction, or that consolation. The electorate of our country has had a good, clear, years-long look at Donald Trump. His braggadocio and his decline. His corruption and his vulgarity. His resentments and his threats. The warnings about what he would do from the most senior people who had ever worked with him, starting with his own vice president.

And, with eyes wide open, with the evidence before them, most of our fellow-citizen voters decided: Bring him back.

Yes, sure, there are what-ifs? this time. What if Mitch McConnell, after condemning Trump for the January 6 assault, had mustered courage to match even that of Mitt Romney and the other GOP Senators who voted to convict Trump on his second, Jan 6-related impeachment? McConnell could have assembled his caucus to do so, which would have permanently barred Trump from seeking office ever again. (Counting Romney, seven Republicans voted to convict; it would have taken 17.) What if in this past month George W. Bush had matched the courage of hundreds of his appointees, one of his daughters, and his vice president (and that vice-president’s daughter)?

What if Joe Biden had stepped aside earlier? What if Kamala Harris had chosen a crucial swing-state governor as her running mate?

Among these, only the impeachment-conviction vote would have stopped Trump for sure. Based on what we’ve seen now, I have doubts whether any of the rest would have. The stakes were clear. And the voters chose.

By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. Minimum of gaffes; maximum of concentration on “strategic” states. The broadest alliance in modern political history—Beyonce to Dick Cheney. The smallest number of backstage, backbiting leaks or second-guessing. This on the heels of what was at least statistically the strongest re-election year economy of any incumbent party in many decades.

By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. Mounting insults to known voting blocs—starting with the biggest bloc of all, women. Increasing darkness, rambling, and resentment in Trump’s public appearances. Visibly diminishing crowds. Leaks from disgruntled staffers blaming others for a likely defeat.

And none of it mattered.

The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million.

“Absolute” is the relevant term here. The results last night appear to be so sweeping and absolute, on so many fronts, with so few caveats or complications, as to give us an unsparing view of our country in our time.

Two weeks ago, I quoted two celebrated and veteran campaign strategists—the Democrat James Carville, and the Republican Stuart Stevens—on why they were confident that Kamala Harris would win. Each of them rested that outlook on the character of the country.

Stevens said, to members of the broad Harris coalition:

There are more of us than there are of them… This is yours. Walk out and take it. You will look back at this moment with quiet pride and satisfaction for the rest of your life, knowing that when America called, you answered.

And Carville:

A vast majority of Americans are rational, reasonable people of good will. I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice…. I know that we know we are better than this.

Two professionals who had based their careers on knowing the country turned out to be badly wrong about its nature, as expressed on November 5, 2024. It turns out that we are not better than this. That is why I thought last night of the famous verse from Little Gidding: We are arriving where we started, and knowing the place—our America, of this moment—for the first time.

This darkness has always been in us. And it’s shown itself in various heinous ways in the past. But Fallows, Stevens and Carville believed, as did I, that at this moment in time, at least, we were better than that. We are not.

There is something wrong at the core of our political culture and our society at large that’s reasserting itself through Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. We can’t pretend any longer that it isn’t real and very possibly enduring.

Try, at least

Simon Rosenberg offers some advice I’m too obsessed and upset to take. Nevertheless:

There will be plenty of time to assess what happened and where we go from here. I am going to go slow and take my time. I suggest you do the same. Take care of yourself and your friends. Take long walks, spend a little more time with your kids, call an old buddy. Return to a hobby you miss. Enjoy life. Enjoy it. Take your time, now, and avoid diving into a world of half-baked hot takes, bad faith commentary, angry Tweets and crowing MAGAs.

I wake up this morning with one overarching sentiment – pride in all that you did this election to fight for your democracy and your freedoms. Our family left it all out there on the playing field. We gave more money than has ever been given. We built the biggest grassroots machine that’s ever been built. We wrote more postcards, made more calls, whipped off more texts and knocked on more doors than ever before. I wake up this morning with no regrets, knowing I worked as hard as I could over these few few years. I know many of you feel the same way, and I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. It is has been an honor of a lifetime to be in community with all of you these last 20 months, doing more and worrying less, together.

He adds something we here have been on about for some time:

I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.

Brian Beutler offers more of the same on the slowness to adapt.

Don’t get me started. Not today.

Be careful what you wish for, MAGA

“Where do we go from here?” Digby asks this morning. She doesn’t know. Nor do I. Just as I don’t know how she had the emotional stamina to write it.

All this time, I told friends last night, it seemed as if observers of the MAGA cult were studying the grotesque creatures of Looking Glass World. People such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and RFK Jr. Facing a second Donald Trump presidency, with J.D. Vance as heir apparent and a Supreme Court MAGAfied for the rest of my lifetime, it feels this morning as if Looking Glass World was, in fact, studying us. Except the image that came to mind wasn’t from Lewis Carroll, but Rod Serling.

IMDB summarizes “Eye of the Beholder” from “The Twilight Zone”:

Janet Tyler is in hospital having undergone treatment to make her look normal. It’s her 11th trip to the hospital for treatment and she is desperate to look like everyone else. Some of her earliest childhood memories are of people looking away, horrified by her appearance. Her bandages will soon come off and she can only hope that this, her last treatment, will have done the trick. If not, her doctor has told she will be segregated with a colony of similar looking people. 

It is a place where Janet can find acceptance among her “own kind.” Banishment is how her society deals with its grotesques. Serling reflects in the episode’s coda, “On this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned – in The Twilight Zone.”

Except Trump is not known for being that compassionate. He’ll want to impress the strongmen of the world, hoping that finally the Vladimir Putins and Viktor Orbáns will admit him as a member of their version of Mar-a-Lago. There will be banishment for immigrants, segregation for minorities, self-segregation, either within the U.S. or abroad, for those with the means and their remaining strength to resist.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” Our system of law and order has always been capricious in this country. One system for the rich and another for the rest. Trump will use the power of the presidency to quash federal prosecution of his own crimes and pressure states to drop theirs. He’s promised to use law enforcement to exact retribution against his enemies, to unleash federal and local police against those he deems thugs, including Americans exercising their First Amendment rights, protesters and press included.

Trump has abused that de facto dual system his entire life to avoid consequences for his own criminality. With sheer doggedness and deep pockets, he’s learned he can, if not defeat opponents, stall them, wear them down until they go away.

This morning, exhausted after years of pushing back, I wonder how much I’ve got left.

We won all our in-county races here in Buncombe County (as we do) despite Hurricane Helene’s ravages. Josh Stein defeated the “Black Nazi” running for N.C. governor. But it looks like a mixed bag on the rest of our state races, including judicial ones. Democrats defeated the author of the “bathroom bill” running for attorney general, and the home-schooling conspiracist who would be superintendent of public instruction. I haven’t had time to score the legislative balance.

The world must be shuddering this morning. Ukraine especially, along with NATO. Trump’s supporters soon may find the protections they thought the Constitution afforded them are as worthless under Trump and Project 2025 as Trump NFTs.

A second aphorism comes to mind as I close. Be careful what you wish for, MAGA.

I don’t have any idea

Donald Trump has once more won the presidency. It’s as shocking as it was the first time and even more terrifying. We should have seen this coming from all the polling which showed that the race was tied nationally and in the swing states. Of course it was possible. But I think a lot of us, myself included, once again fell for the illusion that America is too fundamentally decent to elect someone like Donald Trump. We were wrong.

In 2016 that starry-eyed naivete led to the deep despair that we all felt when Trump eked out a win over Hillary Clinton. And in 2020 we believed that dream was vindicated when Joe Biden turned the tables and eked out a win over Trump. And here we are again, caught in a swirling vortex from which we can’t seem to escape.

The funny thing is that until recently I had assumed that the contest was going to be political trench warfare again and the result would be very close. It has seemed to me for a while that we’re in an ongoing war between two coalitions that can be defined as pro-democracy and anti-democracy and they have roughly equal political strength. The razor thin margins in the congress and these incredibly tight presidential races bear that out.

Yes, Donald Trump is the leading figure in this fight as the man who best articulates the anti-democratic coaliton’s impulses but he also hinders them with his crudeness and lack of discipline. Meanwhile, the pro-democracy coalition is diffuse and leaderless but is helped by the fact that it’s less crazy. Joe Biden managed to pull it out in 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic when there were just enough people in the right states to recognize that Trump wasn’t up to dealing with it. He was also a white man, which clearly makes that choice easier for some people. (It cannot be a coincidence that the rank misogynist brute, Donald Trump beat the two highly qualified Democratic women he ran against.)

I knew all this. And I assumed 2024 would be a tough race for Biden to win although I thought he would probably be able to do it because he managed to “deliver” on so many of his promises, particularly on the economy, which many smart people assured me was the key to winning over voters. Surely, the people would start to see that inflation had abated and the job market was great and that interest rates were coming down, right? All that new manufacturing in the swing states had to count for something. But when it became clear that he could not campaign effectively and he turned it over to his Vice President who seemed to electrify the pro-democracy coalition I began to believe that this time it would win decisively. I was fooling myself.

Donald Trump bungled the worst health crisis in a century, has been found guilty of fraud and liable for defamation and sexual assault, and is currently under indictment for stealing classified documents and attempting a coup in 2020. He acted deranged and demented on the campaign trail and it changed nothing. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes, he was right. There is literally nothing he can do to make his faithful followers move away. And that’s because it’s really not about him, it’s about them.

Trump has solidified his grip on nearly half the voters in this country because, as journalist Lindsay Beyerstein tweeted last night, “he created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore or deny all the facts and focus on hate.” Our modern information ecosystem, the social media and cable news silos have allowed him to construct an alternate reality for the Republican Party and they eagerly accept it because it feeds their sense of fear and loathing of the other. And it isn’t just the kooky QAnon conspiracy types — he managed through sheer repetition to convince otherwise normal people that his first term was a golden age of peace and prosperity and that the country today is a dystopian hellscape because the price of eggs is higher than it was five years ago.

On some level these people know that’s all nonsense and Trump knows it too. This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it:

If you want to understand what's happening, forget about "the economy" and immigration and all that. This is happening all over the world, among people who think that others are *unjustly* living better than they are – even while they themselves are living well.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 6, 2024

Nichols added, “resentment and false nostalgia (and affluence and boredom) are deadly threats to democracy, as we’re about to learn.”

It’s not about policy no matter how much people insist that it is. We know this because in places like Missouri voters just passed initiatives for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, all Democratic policies, while overwhelmingly voting for a Republican senator and a president who strongly oppose these things. This is about aesthetics and attitudes. A majority of Americans want an autocratic strongman show and Donald Trump and the Republicans are happy to give it to them.

The anti-democracy coalition under Donald Trump is on the verge of fascism. He and many in his party are already there. We know this because we know their plans. We’ve all been discussing Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and Schedule F for months now. Trump’s mass deportation policy may never come to full fruition but they will certainly make an example of some people if only to entertain the base. Recall how much they loved those migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard and the like a year or so ago. Some televised knocking down of doors and throwing crying women and children onto buses ought to give them a thrill (a double thrill when the Democrats get hysterical about it.)

Here’s Trump promising RFK Jr “a good time” messing around with the public health system:

Trump: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's going to help make America healthy again.. he wants to do some things and we’re going to let him go to it… Stay away from the liquid gold. Other than that, go have a good time Bobby pic.twitter.com/0geobg6kIX

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 6, 2024

We know about Trump’s plans for the economy and since his tariff obsession is his only economic and foreign policy idea, it’s unlikely that even his business buddies will be able to talk him out of it. Foreign allies are no doubt meeting with their national security people as we speak, implementing plans to distance themselves from the United States, knowing Trump’s affinity for autocrats like Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban. America’s adversaries are licking their chops. They know Trump is a pushover.

But the vengeance policy is what’s going to animate Trump the most. His enemies list is long and he will make sure they pay. It’s what he lives for:

Here’s a message from one of the people mentioned as possible Attorney General or White House Counsel:

Dear Jack Smith:

Lawyer up.

— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) November 6, 2024

We survived Trump’s first term, (although his erratic rhetoric and policies during COVID did result in many unnecessary deaths.) But everyone knows by now that this second term is not going to be the same. The Republican establishment has been purged of dissenters and Trump will have only MAGA loyalists in his inner circle. Trump’s new “Government Efficiency” czar Elon Musk is already promising that there will be “hardship” (not for him, of course) as they slash the government safety net that so many Americans depend upon. Everything from environmental regulations to abortion rights to free speech is on the chopping block. And who will stop them?

Can we survive it again? Probably. But it’s going to be much harder. The question is whether the Resistance has the energy to do it all again or will it pull back and just watch it all burn out of sheer exhaustion? After all, they tried their best. They ground out many wins between 2016 and today. But in the end they lost it all again. What’s next?

I just didn’t want to believe it

Mea culpa, I got this one very wrong. As someone wrote on twitter earlier:

He was the worst President in history. And when he got voted out, he tried to stage a coup. Then he stole national secrets and sold the ones he didn’t store in the bathroom. He was convicted of fraud, found liable of sexual assault and convicted of 34 felonies. He is half a billion dollars in debt, owned by God only knows who, and the biggest national security risk the nation has ever had.

But at least he’s not a Black woman.

That was a bridge too far. She ran a good campaign, they did everything they could. Half the country just wants what Trump is offering: a strongman sideshow.

The world is a much more dangerous place today than it was yesterday. The bad guys won.

Jon Meachum in the NY Times:

I thought I knew what we were dealing with. When Donald Trump began his rise to power in 2015, he struck me as a dangerous but recognizable demagogue. As a biographer of presidents, I tend to think historically and seek analogies from the past to shed light on the present. And so, for years Mr. Trump’s marshaling of fear, prejudice, resentment, xenophobia and extremism put me in mind of grievance-driven figures ranging from Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy to George Wallace. To me, Mr. Trump was a difference not of kind (we had long contended with illiberalism in America) but of degree (since the Civil War, no figure with such illiberal views had ever actually won the White House).

Then he proved me wrong. His concerted efforts to overthrow the November 2020 election very nearly succeeded — tangible proof that he is in fact willing to follow through on the authoritarian threats he so freely makes. I now see him as a genuine aberration in our history — a man whose contempt for constitutional democracy makes him a unique threat to the nation.

Let’s not forget that the conservative movement paved the way for this demagogue who would use the many years of right wing vote suppression tactics and lies about voter fraud for his own purposes. He would not have been able to do what he has done without them.

And they’ve gone along with him every step of the way. It’s not just him.

That worksheet from Bolts is downloadable and printable here if you want to keep score tonight (and for the next few days.)

The 2018 John Mulaney “Horse In A Hospital” bit is still so great 😂 Best part is he doesn’t mention the name Trump at all. Oh America, you finally removed the horse from the hospital. DO NOT let it back in 😬 pic.twitter.com/qwb3j5gTIq

— Heath (@LeastHesFunny_) November 5, 2024

happy election day pic.twitter.com/7gBpVrdsTB

— no context curb your enthusiasm (@ProManimalUnity) November 5, 2024

This #ElectionDay, watch @sethmeyers recount Donald Trump’s track record. #ACloserLook pic.twitter.com/M9alPCbpgE

— Late Night with Seth Meyers (@LateNightSeth) November 5, 2024

This is absolutely hilarious

Wonder what @JohnKingCNN thinks about @TheOnion giving him a run for his money on the magic wall 🤷‍♂️🤣
pic.twitter.com/kPGytBsOif

— Christopher Deutsch (@Chris_Deutsch) November 5, 2024

REPORTER: What do you say to people who think you won't concede the election?

TRUMP: I think they're crazy pic.twitter.com/TtYy8AteDx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2024

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by George Clinton (@yolikegeorge)

That’s George Clinton people!!!! Funkin’ for Kamala.!

But back to waiting and hoping. Here’s a little list provided by Axios of the key races the campaigns are going to be looking at tonight. In case you need something else to wring your hands over:

Strategists in both parties told Axios they will be watching key swing races in Eastern and Midwestern states that tend to report most of their votes on Election Day.

Virginia: Polls close here at 7pm ET and the lion’s share of votes should be counted by the end of the night, according to the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight.

Republicans believe a good result in Virginia’s 7th District, where Democrats are trying to hang onto the seat vacated by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who is running for governor, will portend a good night for their party.

Ditto for Democrats in the state’s 2nd District, where Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) is locked in a competitive race but is still seen as a slight favorite to win reelection.

North Carolina: Polls close at 7:30pm ET and most votes should be tallied up not long after midnight.

Republicans are looking to the race in North Carolina’s 1st District, where Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) is defending highly competitive territory, as another bellwether.

Florida: Polls in most parts of the state close at 7pm ET and Florida is known to be one of the fastest states at counting votes, with all precincts typically reporting relatively early on election night.

Democrats feel if they have a good showing against GOP Reps. Anna Paulina Luna or Maria Salazar in the state’s 13th and 27th districts, it will mean a great night for them overall.

Republicans are favored in both districts.

Michigan: Polls close at 8pm ET and the state passed new reforms this year to speed up vote counting after a sluggish process in 2020.

Both parties will be keeping a close eye on Michigan’s 8th District, a pure toss-up race to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee.

The race to replace Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin in the 7th District is seen as slightly favoring Republicans. Democrats believe they will have a good night if they can hold on to the seat.

The race in Michigan’s 10th District, where GOP Rep. John James is seen as a slight favorite for reelection, may be slower due to the district’s largest city opting out of the voting reforms.

Pennsylvania: Polls close at 8pm ET, but election workers can’t begin processing mail-in ballots until Election Day. Still, 87% of precincts were reported by midnight in 2022.

Republicans are keeping a close eye on Democratic Reps. Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright in the state’s 7th and 8th districts, while Democrats are watching GOP Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) in the 10th District. All three races are toss-ups.

Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) in Pennsylvania’s 17th District is considered somewhat safer. Republicans believe a win there would mean the bottom falling out for Democrats.

New York: Polls don’t close here until 9pm ET and mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted until a week after Nov. 5, but the sheer number of battleground districts makes it worth watching.Democrats expect to take out GOP Reps. Anthony D’Esposito and Brandon Williams in the 4th and 22nd districts, while Republicans believe Reps. Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler will hang on in the 1st and 17th districts.

New York’s 19th District, where Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro is fighting for reelection, is one of the most hotly contested races of the cycle and a decisive result either way could preview the night ahead.

Republicans are also hoping for a surprise in New York’s 3rd and 18th districts, where Democratic Reps. Pat Ryan and Tom Suozzi are both favored.

Just something else for you to worry about…

Here’s Dave Weigel’s cheat sheet:

Here’s our guide on how to watch the election, hour by hour. You can also check out the Semafor Bellwethers Map, a list of 20 counties that we’ll be tracking in our election night coverage to see how the parties’ performance compares to 2020.

6 p.m. Polls close in Indiana and most of Kentucky. Neither presidential campaign has spent a cent here; both have near-total abortion bans, in place for the first time in a general election, implemented by Republican legislative supermajorities.

If Harris is making any gains with the suburban voters and frustrated Republican moderates she’s targeted, that could show up in Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis. Nikki Haley won 34% of the Republican primary vote there, months after suspending her presidential campaign. Trump won just 52% here against Biden in 2020, while carrying the state by a landslide. Democrat-turned-Republican gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick also closed out her campaign here, as she tries to over-perform in suburbs that might be uncomfortable with the GOP ticket. In Kentucky, any suburban gains for Harris would be visible in Kenton County, outside Cincinnati; Trump won it by just 20 points in 2020, and Gov. Andy Beshear carried it in his 2023 re-election.

What’s happening with the white non-college voters who rushed toward Trump in 2016, inched back toward Biden in 2020, and were overwhelmingly unhappy with his presidency? Watch Vigo County, which became a minor Trump obsession after the Biden loss; it was a reliable bellwether for generations, and he suggested that his victory there, in Terre Haute, proved that the national election was stolen. Trump got 55% of the vote there in 2016 and 56% in 2020.

7 p.m. Polls close in South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, most of Florida, most of New Hampshire, and the first targeted swing state of the night: Georgia. If Trump has made any inroads with Black voters, four years after trying to overturn the election here, that would show up not just in Fulton County but DeKalb County — less wealthy, more African-American. Biden got 83% of the vote there, and two years later, Sen. Raphael Warnock won it with 87%. Even as she lost a rematch to Gov. Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams pulled 81% of the DeKalb vote. Any softness here would point to trouble for Harris, and suggest that the weaker urban turnout in early voting, relative to some rural counties, broke their strategy.

Watch two places that saw late plays by the Trump campaign outside the typical top seven swing states. In New Hampshire, they sent JD Vance over the weekend for a map-expanding rally in Derry, a Rockingham County city that Trump won by just 7 points in 2020, after carrying it by 14 points in 2020. Haley got 34% of the Derry vote in the primary, worse than she did statewide. Watch the delta between Trump’s performance and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, the party’s candidate for governor, who has been building a slightly different, less conservative coalition.

In Virginia, keep an eye on Roanoke County, where both Trump and Vance made campaign stops; Trump won it by 22 points in 2020, and Glenn Youngkin ran 10 points ahead of that a year later. Networks called Virginia four years ago when just 75% of the vote had been counted, so a closer race would be bad news for Harris. Watch Stafford County in the northeast — Biden won it by 3 points, Youngkin won it by 11, and Democrats are trying to hold the 7th Congressional District, where they tied here in 2022.

This was the first cycle since 1988 with no serious competition for Florida, and its shift right in 2020 and 2022 made it almost useless as a bellwether. Both Trump and Ron DeSantis had sliced into the Democratic advantage in Orlando’s Osceola County — DeSantis actually won it in his re-election— thanks to their strength with Puerto Rican voters and recently arrived Hispanic immigrants. If Trump is outrunning his 43% number from four years ago, the damage of a roast comic mocking Puerto Rico at the Madison Square Garden rally might be limited.

7:30 p.m. Polls close in Ohio, West Virginia, and North Carolina.

Democrats lost Appalachian Ohio during the Obama years; they finally lost northeast Ohio under Biden. Trump was the first Republican nominee for president since Richard Nixon to carry Mahoning, which had been deep blue even outside the city of Youngstown. In 2022, when Youngstown’s own Tim Ryan ran for Senate, he lost the county for the first time in his career, to Republican JD Vance. It didn’t matter that the county’s Chevy plant closed under Trump, or that it saw its lowest unemployment rate in decades under Biden. The new Senate will be coming into view, too; Sherrod Brown won the county by 21 points to win his current term, and if he’s not holding on to most of northeast Ohio against Republican Bernie Moreno, Republicans have probably succeeded in closing the gap between Trump and their less well-known Senate candidates. That’ll matter for the rest of the night.

Republicans re-gerrymandered North Carolina for this cycle, and the 1st District is now the only competitive House district in the state. If Democratic Rep. Don Davis struggles against Republican nominee Laurie Buckhout, it would mean that the rural Black vote has softened for a Black incumbent, which would be a problem for Harris.

8 p.m. Polls in about half the country will close, including Pennsylvania and all but four small counties in Michigan. They’ll also close in safe states where any dramatic shifts since 2020 should be obvious: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and the panhandle of Florida. And they’ll start to close in Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas.Biden won Pennsylvania by out-performing Clinton in the eastern half of the state — except for Philadelphia, where Democrats have been losing a little ground every two years. He carried Lackawanna County, his birthplace, by 9 points, after Clinton nearly lost it. She netted just 3600 votes there; he netted 9600. If Trump improves there, he’ll be cutting off one of Harris’s paths to victory; if she is improving with the suburban moderates and women who Democrats say they’re winning now, that would show up in Montgomery County, where Haley got 25% of the primary vote, and Biden got 62% against Trump.

Michigan’s Wayne County will stay Democratic, but the margins there will be telling. Biden got 68% of the vote there, underperforming the Clinton margin in Detroit but crushing Trump in most suburbs. He got 69% of the vote in Detroit and 85% in Hamtramck, two majority-Arab cities where local politicians have turned on the Democrats over LGBTQ rights and Gaza. If Harris is making up for those losses, it might happen in Kent County, which Biden won by 22,000 votes, powered by a landslide in Grand Rapids.

Maine’s rural 2nd Congressional District has gone for Trump in every presidential election, netting him one electoral vote. Democrats are trying to save Rep. Jared Golden while expecting to lose the district. That’ll show if any Democrat is able to pull ahead of Harris in a region that supports Trump.

8:30 p.m. Polls close in Arkansas. If you must have a bellwether, look at Benton County, the home of Wal-Mart and one of the only parts of the state that’s shifted toward Democrats as the party’s improved with college-educated white voters. Biden spent no money and got 35% of the vote there — the best performance by any Democratic nominee since Arkansas’ own Bill Clinton in 1996.

9 p.m. Polls will be closed across most of the country, including Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. (The final precincts will close in Kansas, Michigan, and the Dakotas.)

In Wisconsin, Madison’s Dane County regularly produces a Democratic landslide that Republicans either narrowly overcome (Trump in 2016) or can’t overcome (Biden 2020, Gov. Tony Evers twice). Republicans have gained ground in most of the state, but lost it in the suburban WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington) around Milwaukee: In 2020, Trump became the first Republican nominee since Bob Dole to dip below 60% in Waukesha. Watch Door County, too — just 20,000 votes were cast there in 2020, but Biden flipped it.

In Nebraska, Omaha’s Douglas County will decide who wins the state’s stray urban electoral vote — this time with a Nebraska-born Democrat on the ticket in Tim Walz. Biden got 54% of the vote there in 2020, and Harris should beat that. If the weekend’s blockbuster Selzer poll is accurate, she should also be running ahead of Biden in suburban Des Moines (Polk and Dallas counties in Iowa) and the Minneapolis suburbs.

Neither party thinks that polling captured what’s happening in the Sun Belt. Biden won Arizona’s Maricopa County four years ago by taking a landslide Latino vote in Phoenix, winning non-Democrats in Mesa and Scottsdale, and trimming the GOP margin in more conservative cities and suburbs. Republicans believe they’ve corrected that with their ballot chase. New Mexico’s Valencia County, a majority-Hispanic area that Obama won twice but Trump won by 10 points in 2020, is another place to see whether the Republican hype about the Latino vote holds up.

10 p.m. Polls close in the last swing state, Nevada, plus Montana and Utah and parts of Oregon and Idaho. When Democrats take Nevada, they win Las Vegas’s Clark County by at least 10 points, and they win Reno’s Washoe County, thanks to Democratic strength in Reno, its suburbs, and the Indian reservations. The potential Nevada electorate is bigger than 2020’s, after three years of automatic voter registration, and only half of its mail-heavy ballot load is typically counted by midnight on the east coast. We’ll be more closely watching the count in the Midwest at this hour — the close House and Senate races in Oregon and Montana won’t be mostly counted until Wednesday morning. But by this time of night, unless the races in Michigan and North Carolina are

11 p.m. Polls close in California, Washington, and the remainder of Oregon and Idaho. Most of what’s coming will be mail, and it could take a week for clarity in the closest House races, a pattern that started before the 2020 pandemic. If we’re headed for another evenly divided House, like the one we got in 2022, we won’t know how it’s divided for a week or so. (Mail ballots that are dated on Election Day but arrive within one week of the vote still get counted.)

12 p.m. Polls close across Hawaii and most of Alaska, for all but a few hundred voters in the Aleutian Islands. It may take more than a week, if it’s close, for the results and final ballots to come in for the race for Alaska’s sole House seat.