Election + 3 days--

I have let the results (partial as they are) ferment a bit. I had hoped for a Repthuglican bloodbath but didn't really expect it. We are much too fractured population to realistically expect sun an outcome. I had hoped some of the more irritating Repthuglicans would have been defeated but most survived. At this point, with several states not yet settled and several races still up in the air, I have some observations.

First, American society is far to complex for pollsters to adequately pigeon hole groups or predict what those groups will do. We have heard about "suburban women" ("housewives" if you are as cluelessly stuck in the 1950s as #45) as though they were a stand-in for all white women or even a majority of all white women. We have heard about the "Latino" or, if you recognize that Spanish speaking societies are discussing de-gendering language, "Latinx" as if they are a monolithic group. We have heard about the "black vote" as though all Americans of African genetic heritage think the same way. News reports have begun picking those generalizations apart and showing how the assumptions have made asses of quite a few politicians and pollsters. We all (from the politicians down to ordinary people) need to question closely exactly all aspects of polls: who the targets of the polls are, how are the questions are posed and who is actually conducting the polls.

Next--an absolutely unbelievable and obscene amount of money has been spent on the various races and I am not at all sure it has produced much besides a slightly altered mix in the House and Senate, and (maybe) a new man in the White House. And more spending will be forthcoming since at least one of the Georgia Senate races will go to a run-off and possibly both. Lindsay Graham survived an avalanche of money trying to unseat him. Surely there are better ways to spend a lot of money.

Also, absolutely none of the basic problems in this society have been tackled in any meaningful way. The pandemic is still raging with new cases hitting 100k and a new spike of deaths likely before Thanksgiving. We have some better ways of treating serious cases but the hospitals are again overwhelmed and thought the mortality rate has gone down a small percentage of a large number is also a large number. The only part of the economy that has done sorta well has been the stock market but how many of us own stocks? The unemployment rate looks good only compared to the peak a couple of months ago and we still aren't counting the discouraged workers or the underemployed or the gig workers out of work.

As I mentioned above our society is a crazy quilt of groups and interests but the biggest division are the pro-#45 and the anti-#45 and those are pretty evenly divided. Just look at the popular vote totals if you think otherwise. Those at the moment stand at 72M+ (Biden) to 69M+ (#45). Right now each candidate is in striking distance of a win. But whoever wins the divisions will remain and half of the population will insist that insist that they were robbed if the other guy wins. By the way that division is also reflected in the election maps: blue cities vs. red countryside. This division won't go away after January 29.

As a diversion from the above consider Charles Hugh Smith's post on Of Two Minds.