Los Dias de los Muertos

OK, so a lot of stories in the last few days have focused on the Hillary Clinton transition team and what she'll do after she's elected, up to and including who is being considered for which positions in the all-but-sure-to-come-to-pass Lady President Administration. All of this is of course very exciting and monumentally historic and I really need everyone to just completely fucking stop it right now.

It's an unusual election, to say the least. This is not a revelatory or even particularly interesting statement to make at this point, in a presidential election cycle that has developed spacetime compression and expansion properties that have made it somehow last what feels like 11 full Earth years. It's an unusual sort of temporal vertigo brought on by the reality warping qualities of an unprecedented cosmic cluster of fucks. And every time we think we're on to an equilibrium, someone reaches in and grabs us all by the wherever.

I know from previous cycles that the only actual touchstone, the Delphic oracle breathing in the rationalizing vapors rising from the pure spring of nerd math, is Nate Silver and his team of sexless* know-alls at fivethirtyeight.com. The Obama/Romney race of 2012 had me completely unnerved by its closeness, but the steady tracking lines and arcs keeping Obama just ahead of Mormon Clark Kent were a balm for the nerves, straight through to the correctly predicted end.

By all accounts, the race this time is a) much higher stakes given what I must insist on continuing to assume is the accidental nomination by a major US political party of an orange macaque and b) way, way, way less competitive. The result should be not only a knowing, confident calm on my part, but a burgeoning faith in my countrymen and humanity at large knowing we are about to collectively reject a politics built on a sloppy alchemy of celebrity and racism.

...Except it's not really working. We're 11 days out and I'm a wreck. There's no rational justification for it. Nate Silver gives Hillary and 80%-plus chance of winning, which if you had told me where we'd be by now way back when this race started in like 1987 I'd have been ecstatic. But now we're here and I can't help but find reasons to doubt.

I mean, yeah, she's over 80% likelihood to win and seems to have a lock on enough battleground states to make the electoral college an impossible channel to fit through for the lumbering, listing, gold-painted wreck of the Trump campaign at this point, but like I said before, there are too many bits of detritus and debris keeping this thing afloat this late, even if only just. It's over 80% but the trend-lines are ever so slightly downward...

And also: Nate Silver has been wrong about Trump already once.

Also also: we live in a country where a black man can be charged, tried, convicted and executed for committing no crime in the space of a couple of seconds, but a whole gaggle of white people can be acquitted of all crimes even when they do not contest the basic charges and have thousands of hours of media coverage and witness testimony to confirm the things they already said they did. That outcome should have been unexpected too. But then celebrity and racism, maybe they're forces we shouldn't discount in America this year.


---

*I don't mean nobody will fuck these people, I mean their conclusions are arrived at without passion. Given their rockstar status achieved with the power of statistical compilation and analysis, I imagine there are no real numbers large enough to measure their actual sexual gravity.