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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.

Wed haven’t heard from Trump’s other turnout guru Elon Musk all day. I’m surprised he isn’t standing outside the polling places handing out hundred dollar bills.

He’s melting down:

Can you believe the gall of those women voting for their own fundamental human rights? How dare they!

One Republican operative who has worked with the ex-president’s campaign in the past said it’s clear that Trump is “decompensating” in response to the late Harris surge.

“He’s realizing that he could lose the election, go to prison, and maybe die there,” they said.

From his lips…

Damn right

If she wins today it’s likely to be because of women. Women who are pissed about Trump and enthusiastic about Kamala Harris. It was always a mistake to underestimate that.

This campaign has not been much about the “first woman president” because, I guess, we all decided after Hillary that it wasn’t a good idea to celebrate that lest we upset some people.

But if Kamala wins, it’s a Big Fucking Deal and I am here for it:

Maybe by the end of this day I will want to delete this post and crawl into my bed. (It’s happened before…) But for now, I’m going to enjoy the prospect. After last time I didn’t think the Democrats would have the cojones to nominate another woman in my lifetime. But by an accident of history we got one and she turns out to be an excellent politician who has run a truly impressive campaign under difficult circumstances. I am here for it.

Nate Cohn at the NYTimes wrote a piece making the case for blow outs on either side as well as a repeat of 2020 or 2022 (which is really interesting.) I have excerpted just the Harris blow out scenario (but here is a gift link to read the other possible scenarios.) I have no idea if this will happen (I hope so) — I’ll be happy if the Democrats manage to win in a photo finish.

If Kamala Harris wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.

Democrats have won election after election since Mr. Trump’s upset victory in 2016. They beat him in 2020, and it’s arguably gone even better for them since Jan. 6. They’ve excelled in special elections and overperformed in the midterms (given the tendency for a midterm backlash against the party holding the presidency). They even fared well in this year’s Washington State’s top-two primary — a sort of election year groundhog day for political junkies.

Yes, the electorate is wary of the status quo, but the usual rules haven’t applied since Jan. 6 and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. If people go into the voting booth thinking of abortion, Jan. 6 and threats to democracy — as they have over the last few years — Ms. Harris could win decisively. In the final Times/Siena national poll, she had a 13-percentage-point lead on abortion and a seven-point lead on democracy.

Could Mr. Trump be repudiated with a decisive loss? It’s hardly out of the question. For one, there’s a chance that pollsters have overcompensated for failing to reach his supporters in recent elections.

For another, Mr. Trump’s strength rests on shaky ground. He needs to get disaffected, young, Black and Hispanic voters to turn out and vote for a very different candidate than they would have in the past. If these disaffected voters return to Ms. Harris or simply don’t show up, the race could look different very quickly.

And finally, the race turned toward democracy down the stretch. This is partly because the election itself naturally raises questions about whether Mr. Trump and his allies will accept the results. Mr. Trump has drawn attention to the issue with remarks about using the military against an “enemy within.” His former chief of staff John Kelly also recently said Mr. Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

It wouldn’t take much for the election to feel like a blowout for Ms. Harris. If she outperformed her poll numbers by a mere two points, she would win well over 300 votes in the Electoral College. Given where Democrats were a few months ago, even a modest victory would feel like a landslide.

There’s no reason she couldn’t outperform by even more. After all, the polls show her doing quite well among white and older voters — which, for Democrats, would usually count as the big challenge. On Saturday night, the final Selzer/Des Moines Register poll offered perhaps the most striking illustration yet of that potential strength: Ms. Harris led by three points in solidly red state Iowa. It may not pan out, but she can fall well short of “blue Iowa” and it would still count as a decisive rebuke of MAGA.

If you added the usual Democratic margins among young, Black and Hispanic voters to strength among older white voters, suddenly there are the makings of a rout. The final Times/Siena battleground polls showed her making late gains among exactly these groups.

2020 and 2022 repeats would be a squeaker in the first case and a really weird realignment in the second which would be entirely unpredictable. I don’t know what to make of that. The final possibility of a Trump blowoiut isn’t worth thinking about. If that happens we will have gone past the point of no return.

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.

So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.

We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ― H.L. Mencken

I hate to say it, but he’s right.

What in the world are we dealing with here? Trump is winning the popular vote largely because he cut severely into Big Blue state margins. We’re not polarized anymore, folks.

They won.

Walt Whitman

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

‘Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:

—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

If you are doing god’s work getting out the vote today like my morning man Tom Sullivan is, thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you’re standing in line right now to vote for Harris Walz, your country is grateful. But if you are like many of us, you’ve already voted are living in places where it isn’t close and you’re just on the edge of your seat waiting to see if America is going to come through one more time.

I know what I’ll be doing today — doomscrolling. It’s my jam on a good day. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Mark Liebovich had some advice:

My friend Amanda Ripley wrote in The Washington Post last week about a study in which women waiting to learn the results of breast biopsies were found to have similar levels of stress hormones in their saliva as women who had already learned that they had cancer. “In experiments, people who believe they have a 50–50 chance of getting a painful electric shock become significantly more agitated than people who think they have a 100 percent chance,” Ripley wrote. “Anticipating possible pain feels worse than anticipating certain pain.”

In other words, don’t wallow in the potential for, or inevitability of, a worst-case scenario. Instead, seek out distractions. Maybe edibles too.

Shop for enlightenment beforehand, which you can apply during the white-knuckle hours. To that end, I spent a few days last week reaching out to some of my favorite campaign gurus. I wasn’t seeking intel about the election itself. Rather, my goal was to assemble a last-minute tool kit of coping mechanisms and best mental-health practices.

As much as possible, we should try to make ourselves sensible consumers of the treacherous and triggering torrent of information we will soon be drowning in. Note the metaphor here, as it segues into the important piece of guidance: Be careful where you swim. Avoid needless waves and currents. This includes the majority of information you get on TV before a critical mass of returns are processed, not to mention most of the inane opinions and guesswork and “partial data” you’re getting from the various walls of broadcast noise (disguised as maps) before 9 or 10 o’clock.

“It’s extremely important to consume news on your own terms,” CNN’s Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic consultant, told me. As Election Day approaches, Begala tries to turn off every news notification on his phone that could increase his level of tension. “You cannot let anyone weaponize your amygdala against you,” Begala said, referring to the brain area that helps regulate emotions such as fear. Text bulletins, algorithms, and (God knows) social media are engineered to prey on our amygdala. But resist. You do not need this information right now, let alone predictions or useless speculation. It’s just empty-calorie pregaming. Trust me, you will learn who won and who lost. The news will find you.

Yes it will. I’ll be here all day, posting random thoughts, probably not very coherently. Good luck America.

In case I’m not back by 2nd post time

Sarah Palin has company:

Democrats need to keep putting points on the board all the way to the close of polls on Election Day. Really. Wherever you are. I’m back from a pre-dawn lit drop at 90 doors. Made it back after lit-dropping and reporting on voter traffic at multiple precincts to add this.

Voter traffic in my town this morning is slow after record-breaking early voting in North Carolina, I won’t lie. For voters of every stripe. Don’t misread that.

But early voting was so intense here in 2008 that by Election Day there was virtually no one left to vote at my precinct who intended to. Between 3 p.m. and polls closing at 7:30 p.m., six voters showed up. It was like walking into an episode of The Twilight Zone. A news helicopter came and hovered over US 25 with a camera aimed out the door at our polling place, looking for voters in line. But it was just me and tumbleweeds outside in the street. In the end, Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14,000 votes, 3,000 less than the margin delivered out of our county. That was close. Not Florida 2000 close. Not Roy Cooper 2016 close. But too close.

We can do more. We will do more in 2024.