Getting ready for violence on election day

The nasty guy had refused to do a virtual town hall with Joe Biden. So Biden scheduled a town hall on his own – and the nasty guy scheduled the same sort of event on a different network at the same time. That was last night. I didn’t watch either one. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos toggled between them and has a summary. Biden gave substantive answers to many questions. Since he didn’t have the nasty guy shouting he could talk longer than three seconds. After the event he stayed and talked to voters. He showed basic decency. The nasty guy … did what he did at the first debate. He lied and refused to condemn QAnon. Hunter of Kos discussed an article in the New York Times that described officials getting ready for violence from domestic terrorists on election day. These are national security experts on through local emergency officials. Hunter noted several things the Times article got right, but annoyed that the Times did a soft sell of the underlying message. Hunter sees it as this:

The nation is preparing for violence on and after Election Day because Donald J. Trump, a fascist, is goading his supporters into that violence with rally claims that any loss on his part will be proof that his enemies cheated.

Through the rest of Hunter’s own article he explains how the rest of the GOP has allowed this to happen. Yes, we’re at the point where violence on election day is expected. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reports Democratic voters are working on the antidote to that violence: vote early. As of this morning the Elections Project says 21 million people have already voted, about 15% of the 2016 turnout. That means a couple things: 1. The nasty guy’s efforts to discouraging voting has backfired. 2. In some states, like critical Florida, all this early voting will allow them to tabulate early and undermine the nasty guy’s efforts of credibly claiming a win election evening. There are, of course, other states, such as Michigan, whose laws mean there will be a delay in results. But if Florida is definitive the pressure on Michigan will be lessened. Dan Goodspeed created a timeline chart of COVID-19 cases that runs from June 1 to October 14. The first chart shows the number of cases per million in each state ordered from most cases to least for the 25 states with the most. The bars for each state are colored according to the strength of their party affiliation. On June 1 Massachusetts is worst at 557 cases per million (New York’s peak had passed and it has a much larger population). As a state gets better or worse it swaps positions in the chart. On June 1 Michigan, a pale blue, is 6th worst at 108 cases per million. The chart is a close mix of blue and red. By June 16 so many other states are worse than Michigan that it has dropped out of the worst 25. Now the chart is noticeably more red. By August 1 there are only seven states in the 25 worst that are not pink or red and by the end of August there are only five states not red. A second chart is deaths per million. On October 14 Michigan tied with Florida for 11th place with 731 deaths per million. There are also a few more charts.