LAST DAY OF THE CAMPAIGNS:  The 2022 election campaigns have ended, with no great bombshells, scandals, or accusations.  There was heated speculation that Donald Trump would announce a new run for the presidency on the last night of the campaigns, but he did not.  He simply said he'd make an important statement on November 15th, at Mar-a-Lago.  I doubt if he'll be announcing a new golf tournament.  I think we can safely say that he'll launch his presidential run.  Some will be happy.  Some will not.  But he'll put the spotlight back on himself.

The campaigns just concluded had three identifiable phases.  Phase one, earlier this year, predicted a Republican wave, led by voters angry with the economy and the culture.  Phase two began when the Supreme Court sent Roe v. Wade back to the states, and the Dems thought they finally possessed an issue to exploit.  They had a good run for a while, but, ultimately, the campaigns came back to the things Americans actually care about most – the economy, inflation, crime, and a rotting school system. Democratic gains were largely erased and phase three began about a month ago, with GOP poll numbers returning to "possible red wave" status.

And that is where we are.  Election Day is upon us.  Millions will vote.  The votes will quickly be tabulated, and the TV reporters will give us bulletins starting, maybe, at eight o'clock or so, Eastern time.  But that may only be the beginning.  There are tens of millions of absentee and mail-in ballots out there.  States have different policies on how and when they're counted.  Common lore tells us that Democrats favor the mail-in ballot, whereas Republicans like to show up at the polls.  The Republican nightmare is that the party might have many apparent victories on election night, only see a number of them reversed by the counting of the mail-ins and absentees. 

Or the miscounting.

Joe Stalin once said, approximate quote, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."

Will we have, in the coming days, a sequel to the year 2000 presidential mess, where it took weeks for Florida to gets it vote count straight, allowing George W. Bush to defeat Al Gore and become president?

Or will we have a sequel to the 2020 presidential election, where Trump, correctly or incorrectly, wouldn't let go and insisted that the election had been stolen?  

True, this isn't a presidential year, but the same drama can be played out on the state level, possibly affecting control of Congress.  In 2018, lifelong candidate Stacey Abrams lost the governorship election in Georgia by 50,000 votes, and still maintains that she lost only because of voter suppression.  She's back this year, by unpopular demand, running again for governor.  Far behind in the polls, she's insisting, even before the vote count, that there's voter suppression out there.  We await, with no enthusiasm, her third try.

If we're plunged into a number of recounts, or slowdowns due to the counting of absentee and mail ballots, cries of "fraud" will surely be heard in the land, and some of them may be accurate.  Despite ridiculous claims that questioning an election result is an "assault on our democracy," it is in fact a perfectly proper act, demanding that the count be correct.

President Lyndon Johnson's nickname in politics was "Landslide Lyndon."  He got it when competing in 1948 for the Texas Democratic nomination for U.S.  senator.  He won by 87 votes, and no one could figure out exactly where those votes came from. 

It is said – I wasn't there – that Johnson and his aides scoured Mexican-American cemeteries for names to put on ballots, to make them look legitimate.  An aide came to one tombstone, where he couldn't make out the name.  Johnson ordered the aide to give the man a fake name.  After all, he was reported as saying, he had as much right to vote as any of the others.

We'll be blogging throughout the vote count.

November 7, 2022