Just a short entry this week because, really, All Of The News is going to start happening on Tuesday with the American election. Basically, there are three ways the US election can go at this point.

Option one - which is probably the one you want to happen if you’re reading this - is that Joe Biden’s lead is simply too large for the Republicans to defeat via trickery and deceit. At this point Biden leads in so many swing states this is honestly fairly likely; he basically only needs every state Hillary Clinton won in 2016 (all of which he will win quite easily), and then cobble together 38 electoral votes out of some combination of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Iowa and Texas - all states where Biden is either leading or statistically tied with Trump. If by the end of election night he is substantially ahead in three or four of those states with multiple combinations of them getting him to 270 electoral votes - which is likely - that will effectively be the ball game.

Option two is that Biden is not in fact in the lead and that all the polls are wrong and that Trump wins cleanly. This is exceedingly unlikely - most poll aggregators have Trump’s chances at in between 10% and 2% of winning. He just doesn’t have many routes to victory and he’s abandoned campaigning in multiple swing states (most notably Florida). Honestly, the fact that he has a chance at all given how badly he’s botched the Covid pandemic is an indictment of American society altogether - I mean, leaders around the world who have at least tried to deal with it seriously, regardless of their success in doing so, have gotten a popularity bump because most people are willing to give their leaders extra credit for trying during difficult times. But I digress.

That leads us to option three, which is that Biden wins but Trump declares victory despite not actually winning. This is actually quite likely to happen, because a lot of Biden’s vote is going to be mailed-in votes and Republicans have been trying (and often succeeding) to create impediments to simply count all of the mailed-in votes for months now. I’m not even talking about the well-publicized attempts by the GOP to screw with the Post Office’s delivery of mail-in ballots; I’m talking about the mailed-in ballots which have been delivered. The most notable case is Pennsylvania, where Republicans in the (gerrymandered) legislature have voted to prevent officials from tabulating mailed-in ballots prior to election day; there are a few other states doing things like this, and yes, they’re mostly swing states where Republicans control the legislature.

In this third scenario, it is important to understand that, from a traditional “just count all the votes” perspective, Biden still wins and probably easily. The issue is that he will need some time for all the votes to be counted so that he can win, and the Trump campaign’s strategy - and they have been quite explicit about this - is to declare victory early, try to force states to stop counting votes on the basis of that declaration, and then go to the federal courts - which the Republicans have packed with partisan judges - to get court orders effectively declaring themselves to be the winners.

This is wildly antidemocratic and certainly ludicrous from a common-sense standpoint, but it does nonetheless provide Trump a route to “victory.” That said, such a victory would be so obviously illegitimate that I don’t know what would happen next. But I suspect it would be violent, one way or the other.

Those are the three most common scenarios I can game out. There are others, but they are much less likely and mostly involve widespread violence on election day so let’s just stick a pin in them and hope they don’t happen. Also let’s just hope Biden wins so heavily that Trump has no real option to carry on - although, given Trump’s narcissism I don’t see how that’s entirely possible.

I’ll write something longer next week. Hopefully it’s all good news. See you in seven.