'Men must be governed!'

Often not wisely, I will grant you.

Author

Jonathan M. Katz
November 05, 2024

Before you read this: Vote.1 You can get your voting location, polling hours, track and fix your absentee ballot, and more here:

You can also see if your friends have voted here. If they haven’t, remind them!

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Well, we made it. 1,463 days since polls closed in the last presidential election, 1,459 days since the Associated Press projected a winner, and 1,399 days since Donald Trump tried to overthrow the U.S. government to remain in power, it is once again Election Day. Everything that has happened has happened. All that is left is to get people to the polls, count the votes, and see what chicanery Trump’s legal, political, and paramilitary wings might again have in store.

Four years ago, this newsletter was one of the first (maybe the first?) to recognize that the election was devolving into a coup attempt. Hopefully, tonight will be less eventful.

As for me, I voted early. So I spent the day in something like a fugue state, vacillating between dread, optimism, and cleaning the house. I also spent an hour watching part of Peter Weir’s 2003 masterpiece Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Perhaps another blogger-pundit more committed to academic cosplaying could wring some deeper political-philosophical meaning out of that. I think I just took some comfort watching another group of people being tossed around by unknown seas, chasing and being chased by a half-seen enemy. Highly recommend the movie though. (It’s also the source of the headline.2 )

If you want to know what I think of the race, my thoughts remain pretty much unchanged since I wrote this last week. (See also my summary of Trump’s war record as president.) If you want to know who is going to win, so do I. If you want to know who I think is going to win, I’m posting my prediction for premium subscribers below. It’s unscientific, based on my obsessive reading of polls and the news and just my gut. Feel free to ignore it until the results come out, at which point you can come back here and laugh at me:

There will be plenty of time for postmortems. There are so many factors and sub-factors that go into a decision made by some 259 million people3 , much less one mediated by an archaic and undemocratic system like the Electoral College. Figuring out one or two decisive ones after the fact will be hard enough, forget about doing so beforehand. At this point, the only honest thing that anyone can really say is that anything can happen. Whatever it is, I’ll be there with you. See you on the other side.

And again, if you haven’t yet — VOTE.

1  U.S. readers only. Void where prohibited.

2  Don’t read too much into it.

3  Estimated number of U.S. citizens over 18. Not voting is a decision too.

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