President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

In 2000 I was between colleges and I’d just started working part-time on a sports desk. The staffers gave me very specific orders: No matter what I did, look busy. It didn’t matter if I wrote a recap in five minutes, I needed to spend 20 minutes appearing to work on it. They’d just lost a position and were afraid they’d lose another.

That was my first exposure to useless executive-type editors.

I voted about an hour ago, pretty much straight party line. Despite all the misleading ads telling me to vote no, I voted for the millionaires tax. If you can’t deal with having an extra $40k taken out of each million in income/profit, that’s on you.

 

#SensualVoting

 

YOU TAKE YOUR MEASURED, THOUGHTFUL POST AND GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!

I think you’re spot on. Still a bit of hope the Roe vote and youth vote (Lucy, football) are getting missed in polling.

 

About 2/3 of our newsroom works remotely, but we're deliberately bringing everyone in tonight to build some buzz, cut out some of the inherent communication obstacles, and maybe, just maybe, build a little morale.

We are doing newsroom pizza. There tends to be some debate on exactly where, as we have a lot of "pretty good" pizza places but nothing overwhelming. I hate party squares so I'd take any pizza place that cuts in slices like normal Americans. One of our reporters has celiac disease, so we get a gluten free for him. I'll try and scribble down the "stats" tonight.

I'll probably vote on my way into work at my precinct, a small English Lutheran church. I've yet to have to wait for my ballot in six years of voting. I don't take that for granted.

The state of affairs in my corner of the world:

Federally, we have no Senators up this time. My Congressman has pretty much gone full-on Trump drone and blew us off for the entire cycle (including our election forum). We endorsed his opponent, which given our ownership was shocking, but the district just has too many MAGA types on their 40s and people beholden to mining to seriously consider him losing to a decent but uninspiring candidate who is an econ prof at the local university.

Gov. Tim Walz has been blamed for everything bad in Minnesota over the last four years from the George Floyd riots to the Gophers being 6-3 but is probably in decent shape. He's a hard candidate to run against because he's incredibly earnest. During the pandemic, I called him Minnesota's Strict Dad. The state GOP helped by nominating Scott Jensen, an anti-vax doc with one term of State Senate experience, who then chose as his running mate former Vikings lineman and Shiite Catholic Matt Birk who basically just trolls everyone. That said, someone's probably going to have to answer for the riots, and it's probably going to be attorney general Keith Ellison for a variety of reasons. The fact that he's a black, urban Muslim doesn't help in this state. Haven't seen a lot of polling on Secretary of State, but the GOP is running a full-blown election denier who got busted in the NYT for racist comments about Somalis a couple years back, so I won't be totally at ease until that race is salted away.

 

Precinct I live in has been all mail'in for years. Put it in the mailbox a couple of weeks ago. Straight blue. Voted no on every proposition - especially the sports gambling propositions - except for flavored tobacco ban and arts funding in schools. Water board and judges were the only local issues. Will probably grab some pizza on the way home,since it's a tradition unlike any other.

 

/what a red ripple might look like

 

And I'll be drinking from that later tonight. Maybe I'll order my own election pizza!

 

it's fortified!

 

The talking point I’ve seen on Twitter for the last week is that they think that if the results aren’t known by the end of the night, the Democrats are stealing it.

It’s amazing how some people can take the most meaningless thing and make it sound nefarious.

 

I still remember Rocky Mount Telegram managing editor Jeff Herrin holding a mandatory staff meeting before the 1996 election, trying to get everyone organized on the same page because it was "going to be intense deadline pressure." And he looked at the three of us in sports with a nod and said out loud, "Or for you guys, Tuesday night."

 

I've made that joke several times this fall.

As for us, we're deliberately staying as far out of the way as we can. One of our local D-3's has a handful of events tonight but we're otherwise between seasons and working on a tab.