Last night was so harrowing because the whipsaw shifts of electoral trends felt so much like the rapid and doomy collapse of Hillary Clinton’s fortunes four years ago. It was wrenching. There’s one more failsafe or firewall and then it fades into nothing. The Senate results were super disappointing too. Unless Dems pull off a miracle in Georgia Joe Biden will face Mitch McConnell running the Senate. Court reform will be off. Any significant progressive legislation is probably off the table for two years. That sucks.

But folks, Joe Biden is on the verge of winning the presidency and making Donald Trump only the fourth President to be rejected by the country in a bid for a second term in office in 108 years. Biden will have a decisive popular vote win and his party will maintain control of the House of Representatives. This is a big fucking deal. And ending Trump’s Presidency is an incredibly important accomplishment for the future of this country. That is something to savor.

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We just need to play this out. From what I can tell the numbers in Pennsylvania not only point to a Biden win but possibly a relatively comfortable one. If that is true Arizona and Nevada and Georgia don’t matter, though Biden now seems more likely than not to win all three. Again, this is just based on reviewing the analyses of the remaining votes from people I trust.

Georgia will be razor thin either way. Almost certainly in recount territory. But again, it probably won’t matter. More significant is that we now seem set to have two senate run-offs in Georgia. This opens at least a theoretical path to Democrats controlling the Senate in January. Likely? No. But if Biden does manage to win Georgia by the slenderest of margins, you simply can’t say it’s impossible. So that means a furious battle against two not terribly popular Senators in what is now at least a swingish state.

One thing I’m starting to wonder about is whether the President’s campaign staff and legal team is … to put it bluntly, humoring him. The President looks like he’s in the process of losing fairly decisively. But his campaign is making a series of pretty small-bore legal challenges. Nothing that gives him a chance – even if successful – of shifting the dynamic. To be clear, that’s what should happen. You’re not supposed to try to steal the election. And you shouldn’t have a corrupted federal judiciary open to helping you do that. But if the President is going to win this in the courts – or win it in the High Court – it’s time to go big or go home. But so far he’s not.

President Trump warned us before the election that, as early and mail-in ballots were tabulated and key states shifted blue, he was going to falsely claim that his victory was being stolen. And he warned us he would send his lawyers in to prevent that supposed theft.

But we didn’t know it was going to look like this.

I assume you saw the President’s comments. It’s just a disgrace. An absolute disgrace. You know that. It’s not surprising. I’m going to take a bit of time to share some considered thoughts. But what we saw looked to me like a televised psychological collapse. We know that weakness, losing, humiliation are like searing agony for him, his own personal kryptonite. And now he is there with it, alone. This will get brutal and ugly and stupid. But it’s out of his control. He’s being abandoned by the key political and institutional locuses of power. It’s ugly. It will get uglier. But it’s ending.

That’s it, folks. Joe Biden of Delaware will be the next President of the United States. Kamala Harris of California will be the next Vice President of the United States. January 20, 2021. The law is coming.

Our map won’t say it until the Associated Press gives the word. It shouldn’t be long. But it’s done.

The roiling post-Tuesday debate about polling and polling errors is almost all heat and no light. It’s mostly emotionalism from people who are mad that the result wasn’t precisely as they’d seen predicted or been told or believed — conflating that with their unhappiness about the result itself. It’s also furious efforts to insist that polls being off confirmed their preexisting critiques of Biden or BLM or the left or the establishment or whatever. But there’s one thing I’ve heard over the last 72 hours that strikes me as real and meaningful and connects the largely meaningless debate about polling accuracy with quite critical questions about what is animating politics itself. And that is trust.

Some of them put out statements that alluded, vaguely, to some adherence to precedent in allowing votes to be counted. Some remained silent.

Trump supporters in eastern Pennsylvania have been receiving what amount to anonymous incitement messages via text telling them the race is being stolen from President Trump and urging them to converge on the Philadelphia Convention Center where votes are being counted in Philadelphia. “ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU!”

This is the same location where local authorities appear to have thwarted a planned terror attack on election workers two nights ago.

Send us your reactions and accounts of the celebrations where you are. And thank you. We couldn’t have made it through the last four years without you. You stood tall. You persevered. There is much work to do now. Celebrate now. Get busy tomorrow. Cheers!