Sunshine and clear-blue skies just past noon Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley.

Nice weather for an insane presidential election — way-beyond grasping crazy how close this race is even in the presence of someone that’s not only a deplorable, asshole piece of shit, but also freaking nuttier-than-a-fruitcake and freaking slobbering crazy — and it makes one wonder what the living fuck is wrong with a shitload of Americans (other than ‘cruelty is the point‘):

EXCLUSIVE: New ad from Eric Swalwell depicts Donald Trump in the ‘home’ where he really belongs pic.twitter.com/yDSFRywTbX

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) October 23, 2024

Yeah, except he needs to be locked up.

Why even explained as quiet intensity:

Choose wisely. https://t.co/9At7rqEgdO

— David Clinch (@DavidClinchNews) October 23, 2024

As I mentioned above, psychotic and unreal this race is even at all close — some points in the matter by politics and arts writer Stephen Robinson at Public Notice this morning:

The presidential election remains a coin toss, which in and of itself isn’t unusual. Most presidential elections since 2000 have been very close. Even 2008, the lone blowout, was a nail-biter until the very end of the campaign.

What makes this election so nerve-wracking are the stakes: Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon. He’s currently free on bail after being convicted of 34 felonies and under indictment in multiple jurisdictions. An embittered, increasingly radical, and obviously decompensating Trump openly campaigns on racial scapegoating and retribution against his political enemies. He makes no effort to hide his authoritarian and dystopian vision for a second term.

[…]

But the fundamentals are far different for Harris than they were for Obama. She’s the sitting vice president to an unpopular incumbent president. Joe Biden’s current approval rating is 39 percent. According to a recent Gallup survey, a majority of Americans (52 percent) claim that they and their family are worse off today than they were four years ago compared to 39 percent who say they’re doing better. An AP/NORC poll shows that just 32 percent of registered voters believe the nation is headed in the right direction.

Notably, Harris has maintained relatively high approval ratings despite all that. After the pandemic, most incumbent governments across the globe have gotten clobbered, so it’s notable that she could potentially buck that trend. And it’s not at all implausible that polling is underestimating her support and she ends up winning the Electoral College with a state or two to spare, as Biden did four years ago.

Even elections that we think of as landslides didn’t necessarily seem like that at the time. Back in 1980, for instance, the US economy was in recession and unemployment peaked at 7.9 percent. Nonetheless, the polls didn’t show Ronald Reagan “running away” with the election. Few polls accurately predicted Reagan’s landslide victory over Jimmy Carter.

[…]

A major reason that Harris isn’t “running away with this” is because an overwhelming majority of white voters don’t find Trump’s malicious nature and fundamental unfitness disqualifying.

An Emerson College poll from last Friday has Harris with a slim one-point lead over Trump, but the demographic breakdown is telling: Harris leads with Hispanic voters 61 to 35 percent and Black voters 81 to 12 percent. However, Trump carries white voters 60 to 38 percent. For context, Mike Dukakis had better numbers among white voters against George H.W. Bush in 1988. (The white electorate was smaller then.)

Obama’s white voter support dropped from 43 percent against McCain to 39 percent against Romney. If Trump lost comparable ground among white voters, this nightmare would be over.

This goes beyond rigid partisanship — Republicans just flat out love Trump. Consider that his primary challengers earlier this year were major players, not the Republican equivalents to Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson. And those challengers had fully embraced almost all the MAGA positions except perhaps for Trump’s obsession with the big lie.

Still, Trump, while under criminal indictment, soundly defeated Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, once lauded as Trump without the baggage. In fact, primary exit polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina revealed that GOP voters actually like his baggage. The majority claimed Trump “shared their values,” and it wasn’t as if they were uninformed about his criminal charges. They just didn’t care, with an overwhelming majority in both states saying they still considered him fit to serve even if convicted of a crime.

If Harris wins, it’s because just enough voters accept the rule of law and reality itself. That’s probably why we remain so nervous about the outcome. The election won’t merely determine the next president. It’ll define who we are as a nation.

Thirteen days of anxiety and sweaty, clenched ass cheeks.

Slow mental anxiety seeks an end:

Insane this close, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: ‘President Trump,’ by Jonathan Bass, found here.)