I’m going to leave this post up all day at the top of the blog for commentary as things develop, updating it as the day progresses.

UPDATES

  • 2pm
    – Voting booths have officially closed on the East Coast (8pm EST), although results for places like South Carolina have already been appearing on the RedState site map for the last hour, so I guess there were places that closed at 7pm EST? Or perhaps it means they started counted early ballots?
  • 3pm
    – After some concerns about Ohio, despite it’s polls showing big Trump leads and the 2016, 2020 results for the GOP, the rural places are reporting in and Trump is increasing his lead
    – Georgia and North Carolina are looking good for Trump but in 2020 Atlanta and surrounding counties came in for Biden late. Having said that those places are already some 70% in. Savanna could still make an impact.
    – Incredibly he’s close in Virginia with one of the biggest Dem counties 100% in and the really important one, Fairfax (Washington D.C. suburbs) 60% in, Trump’s performance is very good – but I still can’t see him winning that State and it’s been called for Harris already on a stats basis, at 51% counted,
    – Pennsylvania and Michigan are sluggards in reporting vote totals compared to their neighbours, which raises the 2020 concerns all over again. As with good old LBJ in 1940’s Texas, the Democrats in Detroit and Philadelphia will hold back until the last possible moment.
  • 3:30pm
    – North Carolina called for Trump with 56% of the vote counted.
    – This just in from a mate in the eye of the storm in Pennsylvania who’s got the individual counties. Bottom line is that Trump is beating his 2020 performance across-the-board.
  • 4pm
    – On the Senate front it looks Sherrod Brown in Ohio has finally been given the boot and the reason this is pleasing is that he had a 95%+ voting record supporting his own side but would back-track and fake many of his positions – and it worked for several elections despite Ohio steadily turning red (it used to be a swing state)
  • 4:30pm
    – Georgia called for Trump at 88% of the vote counted – finally.
    – Wisconsin jumping up and down between a vote count of 95% to 37% to 95% to 49%… Awfully suspicious.
    – Trump holding a 2% lead in Pennsylvania.
    – Virginia still a win for Harris but way down on her polling which had her at 3-4% win whereas she’s looking at a <2% win, which is not a good indicator for tougher states.
  • 6:20pm
    – Decision Desk has just put Trump’s chances of winning up to 91%.
  • 7:23pm
    – Fox News just called Pennsylvania for Trump. He’s at 270 and has won the Presidency -assuming there won’t be any last minute breaks in sewer pipes in counting stations.
  • 8:14pm
    – Wisconsin has been called for Trump with 93%, putting him at 280 EC’s. I’m amazed to see that Michigan may soon follow.

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A little apertif…

At midnight last night, NZ Time, polling booths opened in New York City and other places up and down the East Coast of America for the 2024 US election. They will close at around 2pm today, NZ time, although they may be extended if there are problems – and there are always problems; lack of ballot papers, voting machine glitches, etc. Even on that coast the times will vary between cities large and small. On the West Coast they opened at about three hours ago and won’t close until midnight, NZ Time, but by then the contest may have been decided because the entire West Coast, like much of the East Coast, is solidly Democrat and the election will be decided, fittingly, in the middle of the nation.

Specifically it will hinge on the so-called battlefield states, the swing states that move between parties and candidates every four years. They are listed here, but you will also need to watch what happens later today (late at night in the US) at the major urban centres of these swing states (listed in brackets)

  • Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
  • North Carolina (Charlotte)
  • Georgia (Atlanta)
  • Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
  • Michigan (Detroit)
  • Arizona (Phoenix)

Although it may pay to watch Virginia and even New Hampshire, where Trump has closed up to Harris in polling in recent days. The residents of Pennsylvania will be happy to know that the Keystone State is likely to be exactly that for whoever wins the election – but it’s been pointed out that Wisconsin might also turn out to be the hinge upon which this election is won or lost.

As far as sites to watch I’m picking Real Clear Politics, who have good summaries and vote total updates, although there are always glitches. In 2016 I was having online discussions over at Kiwiblog and saw some places sitting at 97% or 99% votes counted even as other reputable websites said they were at 100%! Red State will have a Live Chat and updated reports.

But of course Election Day in the US has stretched out to election month in many places, with tens of millions of people having already voted. In the past the Democrats have been superb at getting to these votes, banking huge numbers and building big leads over the Republicans before election day. For example, IIRC, John McCain actually beat Obama in vote totals in 2008 on election day, but it didn’t matter because Obama already had a huge lead in early votes so ended up with a solid victory anyway.

It’s taken a while but the GOP have finally begun to do the same and the results as of last night have been telling, with the Democrats still leading the GOP in the swing states but at nowhere near the levels of 2020 and specifically with the urban vote totals that they depend upon being way down from that election in all the battleground states, such as these three:

Pennsylvania:  -381,519 votes 
North Carolina:  -175,470 votes
Georgia:  -153,846 votes

My blog colleague “Tinman” said the other day that probably “not more than 1,000 New Zealanders give a shit” about this election, and he may well be correct, although I’d peg the numbers at perhaps 10,000 as there may be that many Yanks alone living in our nation of 5 million.

But it was probably true of the first US Presidential election I ever paid any attention to in 1980. After that the amount of news devoted by NZ sites to these US elections has grown, and with the arrival of the Internet it has exploded. You can now sit on the other side of the world and track the vote totals in Nash County, Pennsylvania, just as you would the electorates of your own nation.

The cultural impact has grown as well over that time – which is true of all things American, note how many young people talk of “math” and being “pissed” as older generations of Kiwis do not. I recall sitting in a varsity lounge in 1980 watching a map of the USA showing the Reagan tide sweeping over the nation and a mate of mine, Matt Brebner, who had spent a year living in California on a high-school exchange, sitting there saying: “We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die”.

Even then I was skeptical of such predictions of doom, even with all the nuclear weapons, the Cold War and Reagan’s portrayal by his opponents – and some in his own party – as an extremist on many issues and who would be the last Cold Warrior as the mushroom clouds loomed.

I remain skeptical of doom still, even as I acknowledge that America has big problems, especially with government finances at the Federal, State and Municipal (City) levels. Those are not going to change whether Harris or Trump is elected. The USA is approaching a wall and gaining speed: only a crash will change things.

As to the election some general thoughts:

  • This has been the wildest and strangest Presidential election in my life.
    • Having what are effectively two incumbents battling it out has not happened in a long time.
    • Trump is trying to win non-consecutive terms, something not done in 130 years since Grover Cleveland.
    • Two assassination attempts on the GOP candidate.
    • The Democrat standard bearer in mid-year revealing his own decreptitude and senility in a debate and then being destroyed by his own Party and replaced almost overnight in a bloodless coup.
    • The sheer volume and intensity of hate against the GOP candidate has exceeded anything I’ve ever seen – even beyond that thrown at ChimpBushHitler twenty years ago.
    • Kamala Harris is the most vacuous Presidential candidate I have ever seen.
  • That last point is the result of the growing irreconcilability between two basic groups of Americans who see the world very differently. One issue divided the country in the 1850’s, slavery, and perhaps arguments about the role and size of the State in the wake of the Slump. But there was agreement on much else: the Confederate Constitution largely copied that of the USA circa 1860.

    But now there are two sides that increasingly have little in common on anything and whose objectives are so opposed. One side demands ever more control over the lives of people in everyday things (aside from sex and drugs), and is increasingly open about rejecting the Constitution if that’s what it takes. When I lived in America I never considered the politics of my neighbour or workmate. Now I’d be very wary of living next to or working with a Democrat; I’d always be wondering if they’d snitch on me to the authorities about owning a gun, or a squirrel, or about wearing a mask or being vaccinated or using the wrong pronouns about another person.

    What shared citizenship can there be between such people? How can they live together as citizens of a common republic? Do they even want to?
  • This year has possibly the final collapse of the MSM, at least as being seen as fair and balanced arbiters of the news. We’re now back in the 19th century, when newspapers made no bones about the ideologies and politics they supported or opposed. I think that’s a good thing because what we’ve had for fifty years now has been a sham of fairness and balance.
  • Trump will win and I think it will be a more solid victory than 2016. He vastly outperformed his polling in 2016 and 2020 and I see no evidence that the pollsters have been able to correct for this, even knowing that they’re missing Trump voters in their sampling.
  • The GOP will win the Senate but may barely hold on to the House or lose it by a small margin, which will then limit what Trump can do. Sadly I see no sign that the Democrats will do anything less than continue to wage war on Trump. We might even see a third impeachment.
  • Even if Trump wins and has a GOP Senate and House I sadly don’t think we’ll see much more action than we did in 2017. Back then they should have had legislative actions lined up like planes on a runway, but under the “leadership” of Paul Ryan all that happened was the usual GOP tax cut.

    Trump will deregulate as he did before and use the powers of the Presidency to reign in the bureaucracy and that may be enough to spark an economic boom as it did between 2017-2019. But the Administrative State is now so huge that it is beyond the ability of any President to control. Even the welcome overthrow of the Chevron defense by SCOTUS was the result of bureaucratic actions taken during Trump’s presidency, occurring so many management layers below him that probably nobody in the White House was even aware of it.

    But any wholesale dismantling of the “Deep State” is not on the cards. The GOP simply don’t have the stomach for it. No change to Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid; Trump has been against that from the start.
  • If Harris wins:
    • The Obama factions that have controlled Biden will continue on the same paths with their new puppet. It will effectively be Obama’s 4th term on the drive to fundamentally transform America.
    • The lawfare against Trump will continue and they will try to throw him in prison. No care will be taken as to the damage this will cause to the public support of the DOJ, FBI, etc.
    • It will also continue against his supporters, whether it’s lawyers being disbarred or fired as a warning to never again oppose the Democrats election efforts, or even someone as rich as Musk (I already see online demands to cancel the government contracts with SpaceX and Starlink)
    • Abortion will become even more sacramental for it will be seen has having saved the Democrat Party in two successive elections.
    • The borders will be opened again and at least another ten million will pour into the country, this time aided by Federal authorities who will contain them in Texas and other Republican states in order to turn those states to the Democrats permanently (Even not voting, migrants give Democrats 14 more electoral votes).
      Even without giving them citizenship by any means necessary, the numbers will change the electoral balance of states via the census, which counts everybody – there’s a reason the Democrats fought against Trump’s request to have the census identify citizenship. As Musk has said, there will be no longer be any swing states and the Democrats will drive to Make America California.
    • The most dingbat ideas about education will be pushed across American schools harder than ever by an empowered Federal Department of Education. Home schooling will continue to grow.
    • The Green Nude Eel and such will be pushed hard against traditional American industries like car manufacturing and fossil fuels.
    • Israel will be in deep trouble and find little or no backing from a Harris Administration.
    • The Russia-Ukraine war will continue to grind away.