As we begin this big, perhaps seemingly endless day, I wanted to thank all our subscribers, more than 34,000 of you. I’m really proud of the job this team has done all year. It’s been a grueling political cycle, compounded by a global pandemic that has had us out of our offices and working remotely since early March. But a through line of consistency we’ve had throughout is a relative financial stability. That’s allowed all of us to keep our heads down and bring you the news. And that is entirely because of you, our subscribers. This isn’t any lofty hocum of ‘we couldn’t have done it without you’. We very literally could not have done any of this without you: your subscription fees make up about three-quarters of our revenue. That support not only makes what we do possible. It also gives us some breathing room and predictability to look a bit over the horizon, to be more creative about how we can improve, how we can up our game. So thanks.

A few thoughts again seriatim, in no particular order.

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.