People, Steve Schale is the Democratic campaign guy I trust more than anyone else to tell me what’s happening on the ground in Florida, how to understand the polls, the turnout data, the results as they come in tomorrow evening. It was Schale looking at the returns in real time and commenting on them on Twitter four years ago that told me something bad was happening. Here’s his final rundown for this cycle on what he’s seeing in his home state.

Even if President Trump finds himself awarded the same fate as impeached President Richard Nixon — that is to say, either not charged with or pardoned of any hypothetical federal crimes — there’s no chance he will slink away from public life.

We’re now down to the time when it’s all about the numbers. On election nights I have a group of experts I follow to help me understand the numbers. If 50% of the vote is in and they’re mostly from these counties what does it mean? When is a race really done? Here I don’t care about commentary or opinions. I’m looking for that kind of deep knowledge of different states or polls or returns that helps me understand what’s happening. If you’re on Twitter I have this group as a curated list. I follow it and you can too.

A few thoughts seriatim, in no particular order.

You’re probably tense. I am too. We’ve noted in our reporting the cloud of tension that appears to be resting over the whole country as we move to within 48 hours of election day. Some of this is natural. A national election is high stakes. In 2020 the stakes feel and are uncommonly high. That puts everyone on edge.

But these sources of anxiety and tension don’t really make for more than a small portion of what people are feeling. The cloud of tension and menace hanging over the country stems from the specific fact that the President and his party are making an all out press to limit voting, slow vote counting and now toss out literally hundreds of thousands of bonafide, legally cast votes. On top of this, related to this, the President has quite intentionally left open the possibility that he won’t accept defeat but will try to stay in office – likely with the connivance of the corrupt Supreme Court, but perhaps in some unknown way only he knows.

President Trump’s personal lawyer has been on various conspiracy tears for months. His initial fever-swamp stoking about Hunter Biden backfired dramatically, which, in his brain, is apparently just cause to double down.

From TPM Reader NL …

I think there is a small subset of the Democratic universe that appreciates that court reform is vital to sustaining small-d democracy over the near term given the very unhidden corruption of the federal judiciary.

However, as a party, I worry that a loser’s mentality is baked into how we operate. My spouse is a former government attorney with connections through the DC legal community. You cannot imagine how many creative ideas for court reform I have had passed on to me. The one defect with all these proposals is a desire to find the “fair” solution now. This completely mistakes how power works. Without a show of force that establishes that Democrats finally have the intestinal fortitude to do what the moment demands, there is no reason for anyone (let alone McConnell) to take them seriously. Is there a way to break through this academic approach to change? I have no idea. I would not normally care, except that this subset of Democrats manages to be extraordinarily well-connected.

In the chaotic rush of news you may have noticed this headline that another laptop of Hunter Biden’s was found in a February DEA raid. Read a little further and you learn it was a raid on the office of a “celebrity psychiatrist.” One might legitimately ask just how many laptops Hunter Biden owned and why he seemed to be leaving them all over the country – this one was in Massachusetts. But one would look long and hard for any clear reference to the fact that this “celebrity psychiatrist” was in fact a high profile former Fox News commentator named Keith Ablow.

We now have another case in Texas where the state Republican party is going to court to attempt to throw out roughly 100,000 ballots cast via curbside voting in Harris County, Texas. They lost their bid in state courts. So now they’re rushing to federal court where a thoroughly corrupted federal judiciary is likely open to this wholesale disenfranchisement. Federal judges are buying into the theory proposed by four justices on the pre-Barrett Court that only state legislatures can make any changes to voting procedures. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate says state Republicans have drawn one of the most partisan federal judges in Texas to hear the case.

Republicans are shifting course in their attempts to seize victory from the jaws of potential electoral defeat.