Democracy Diary: 1. Vote if you haven't already

2. Text your friends to make sure they vote 3. If you're trying to steal instead of win, you drop a lot of crap red polls

If I’m anything, I’m a Buddhist, so being with uncertainty is kind of my jam.

It’s going to be a close election. No one knows who will win until all the votes are counted.

But we do know that TFG has refused to say he’ll accept the results if he loses. Republicans have been dropping a ton of crappy, red-biased polls - Simon Rosenberg says “17 polls on Sunday alone and at least 75 during the past week. His estimate it is that something like 125 such polls have been circulated since August.”

The point is to drive a narrative that Trump is going to win - so that if he doesn’t, he can promote the Big Lie 2.0.

This is a guy who’s spent the last days of the campaign holding a Nazi-style rally (1), insulting a key demographic he needs to vote for him, and doing events in states that aren’t in play. These are not the actions of a person trying to win a campaign.

Trump might win. But if he loses, be ready for the Big Lie 2.0.

The Daily Beast lays out the plan: Trump Isn’t Playing to Win the Election, He’s Plotting to Steal It.

Here’s some hopeful news: I’ve done about 12 hours of phone banking in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. I’ve done about 12 hours of door knocking over four weekend days. SO. MANY. DEMOCRATS. have already voted. I talked to two Puerto Ricans in PA who were PISSED. I talked to a Haitian in PA who was PISSED. So many people said “Voting Blue all the way!” “Voting Dems all the way down.”

So many people wrote postcards for Harris that there’s a postcard stamp shortage in Brooklyn. Our ground game is better than theirs.

Republicans knew they needed to get out the early vote, and they’ve failed. And they doubled down on the misogyny in an attempt to get young men out to vote, which also seems to have failed.

Either way, once the votes are cast, the work starts.

(1) I spent a lot of time this summer reading about fascism, mostly because I was gobsmacked when a Christian nationalist family member shared some articles from “The American Thinker” alleging that Biden is a fascist. That struck me as textbook Orwellian double speak.

Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them was helpful. Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism was even more helpful. But Sarah Kendzior was perhaps the most helpful of all with her reformulation: “I see Trump as much more of a mafia state operative than a fascist. A fascist has loyalty to the state and wants to embody and expand it; Trump seeks to strip down the US and sell it for parts. This is not his own plan (though he is its financial beneficiary) but the agenda of the mafiosos with whom he has surrounded himself for 50 years. Trump’s ties to organized crime are overlooked in favor of portraying him as a strongman in the Hitler/Stalin vein. This is a mistake and one of the reasons he has not been defeated. You can’t vote out the mafia.” (September 30). Elsewhere she has said “The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” She’s careful to point out that the Democrats are implicated in the transnational crime syndicate as well, which explains why Merrick Garland failed to prosecute the coup-sters - the only nation to have failed to punish those who committed a coup.