Over the span of the last week, as I’m sure it’s been for large swaths of American citizens, it’s been an absolute roller coaster of events, emotions and life in general. I think it’s safe to say that the 2020 presidential election was possibly the most high-stakes, emotional and draining election that there’s been in generations, and it’s probably taken its toll on the millions of Americans who cared about what the end results were. It certainly has done all of that and then some to my household, and I for one am tremendously relieved that it’s over, and the end result was the one we were hoping for.
But there were still a ton of things that swirled through my mind throughout the week of the election and the long, dragged out process that transpired in order for it to reach its conclusion, and because I don’t really want to make a bunch of posts about it or politics in general, as I’ve made way more political posts over the last few years than I thought I ever would, I’m going to do my best to consolidate it to a singular post and hopefully be done with it, and try and get back to writing about anything else, but probably falling back on the topics of how chaotic my life is as a first-time father and talking about poopy diapers.
As election day came and went, I remember feeling like there was a massively important sports game where I had a tremendous amount of vested interest in – meaning I didn’t want to know what was going on as it was going on, since I always feel like solely me and my participation in watching it will entirely sway the result into precisely what I did not want to see happen. That being said, as the afternoon rolled into the evening, polling stations closed down, votes began officially being tabulated and counted, and news outlets all turned into gigantic tickers with silhouettes of the states of the United States turning red or blue but mostly red, much to my disgust.
There were many states that it was no surprise to see go red, and the real game was in all of the states that were known battleground states, as well as the few states in which always are the ones that sway most of the elections in the past, like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. And because all of flyover America have fewer electoral votes, it’s always disheartening all the same to see the vast majority of the land of the United States glowing red from the onset, and it always creates that feeling of blue team always feeling like they’re playing from behind, and as sports fans, how much it sucks to always feel like you’re playing from behind.
My wife and I both went to bed feeling disgusted with the state of the country, that in spite of the tyranny endured throughout the last four years, all the bullshit, all the abrasion, all the racism, all the flagrant contrarianism, all the lies, deceit and just plain shitty leadership, the baked potato was still putting up a legitimate challenge to the presidency. I mean, this was absolutely no surprise at all to me, and I’d warned anyone who would be willing to listen that this was going to be the case, and to expect this, but it was still disheartening to actually see it come to fruition, because in spite of my predictions, I always hoped that this would’ve been like a 2008 election where the victor was determined and announced by 10 pm.
But then the following day, America witnessed as Joe Biden’s electoral vote lead continued to grow, while the baked potato’s EV count remained static. Maps of the US showed the states that had yet to be called showing surprising splits, and fewer more surprising than North Carolina and Georgia, two notoriously historically always-red states that were wavering. Wisconsin and Michigan slowly tipped over into favoring Biden and were eventually declared wins for team blue. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania was decidedly in favor of the baked potato, but the tremendous amounts of mail-in ballots that had yet to be tabulated, were speculated to probably be mostly in favor of Biden, and if and when they were all counted, a blue victory was to be expected.
After the first day, the media made some fatalistic remarks about how the supposed Blue Wave that was supposed to lead to an easy Democratic victory never came to fruition, and that the baked potato was in a sitting pretty position to win reelection, but it’s evident that the media, much like the world today, is all about immediate results, so it’s easy to proclaim that there was no Blue Wave, after the first day. But the reality is that the Blue Wave was and always was, mail-in ballots, and despite their slow tabulation and factoring into the voting numbers, were the obvious factor that decided the whole thing.
Frankly, this election was like the biggest game of Hack-A-Shaq in history; Team Red had built up a lead, and was trying to hold onto it, but Team Blue was fouling everyone in sight in order to delay the clock by sending Team Red to the free throw line, and since there is a correlation between poorer free throw shooters as time progresses, Team Red kept missing their free throws, and Team Blue would dump more and more mail-in ballots into the score, reducing the deficit slowly but gradually, until they actually managed to take the lead and overcome.
That analogy didn’t come out as well as I had thought about in my head, but take my word for it, in about 95% of the time you watch a basketball game where teams resort to Hack-A-Shaq, because they mathematically think they can win if they can just have more possessions, to it’s surprising to see a similar tactic being used in a presidential election, to success.
I have to say, among the things I was most thrilled to witness throughout this whole election, was the fact that Georgia flipped blue, for the first time since literally, Bill Clinton. I honestly never though I’d really have seen the day in which this would happen, especially since over the last few years, Georgia has seen some pretty flagrant episodes of voter suppression and foul play in elections, most notably due to the interference of Bubba Kemp. Frankly, one of the more amusing things to have watched was that Kemp’s hand-picked successor to the vote-controlling Secretary of State position, Brad Raffensberger, play his role completely straight and down the middle, and run a fair and dignified counting process, even if it meant his own Republican side coming out on the losing end. Which ended up being the case, as after conventional voting ended, it was undoubtedly the hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that ultimately decided the fate of the state, and much to my delight, witnessed it go blue, and I can feel happy for my daughter to know that in her birth year, her birth state went blue, defying all sorts of historical tendencies.
And primarily on account of mail-in votes, and the slow but inevitable Team Blue victories in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, it became academic that Joe Biden would win the presidency, thus officially ending the regime of the baked potato, and hopefully put America onto a path of redemption and restoration. This was a truly joyous and welcome result, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I could physically feel the feeling of hope and optimism for the country for the first time in four years. Watching and listening to the victory speeches of both Biden and new Vice President Kamala Harris, were truly evoking emotions, and it’s crazy to just how invested I felt about all of this, and I have to imagine that millions of Americans probably felt the same.
Make no mistake though, even though the election went the way I had hoped it would go, and this was most certainly a monumental victory for America, it was also a colossal failure by America at the same time. Joe Biden defeated a truly despicable human being for the presidency, but frankly he should never have been in that seat in the first place, and nothing will change the fact that in spite of all the lack of qualifications, the deplorable behavior and abysmal leadership over the last four years, he still was voted for by 70 million Americans who were completely okay with a sexist, racist, bigot who had no clue how to be diplomatic much less run a country. Literally 49% of America has no moral compass, or are completely at peace with themselves at being racists, sexists and bigots, and when the day is over, there’s hardly a victory in this election at the very end.
That being said, one of the things my wife and I mused about was if the baked potato could technically run again in 2024 or any other future presidential election. Technically, he could, as he did not serve a second term, and as Grover Cleveland did, he could take the office again if he were to run and succeed in a future election. As much as I am enjoying the good times of a Democratic victory, I could very well imagine in four years, this egomaniacal dictator taking another stab at it, and with a very fanatical and loyal base, could basically be a legitimately threatening third party, if he and his idiot kids continue to alienate and blame the GOP for their failures.
Whatever though, that’s in four years, and after the last soul-sucking and demoralizing four, I too, would like to savor in this win, and believe in the hope and optimism for redemption for this entire country. It’s going to be far from quick and easy to turn all this shit around, given the holes that the previous regime put everything, but I legitimately feel like I can breathe easier just knowing that the country is going to be run by people who might actually know what they’re doing.
One of the more gratifying things already being witnessed, is the expedient and massive reduction in disgusting Potato/Puppet signs all over the place. Not surprising, given where I live, there were quite a number of them all over the place, but almost as sudden as the result emerged as soon as Pennsylvania was confirmed, the signs began immediately vanishing. But I still have a good inventory of the people in my own neighborhood who are completely at peace with themselves in being racists.
A “joke” I made with my friends was that Inglorious Basterds kind of had a good idea – Aldo Raines marking Nazis with swastikas on their heads, so that they wouldn’t be able to go back into blending with society once WWII ended; I’m not saying that branding people is the best idea, but I also don’t like the idea that they’re allowed to go back into blending back into society in plain sight.
So since mutilation isn’t really an acceptable form of punishment, I think the next best thing is a little bit of retaliation; sure back in 2016, Hillary Clinton didn’t want to play dirty and always tried to take the high road, and the Democratic party basically acted the same way, even in defeat. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said about the opposition and their mindless supporters, and everyone else had to endure the last four years with some of the most arrogant, insufferable and trolling behavior from right-wingers. And frankly, I see no fault in wanting to give a little retaliation to all of these assholes, so I’ve been in no rush to remove by Joe sign from my yard, especially if the potato followers all near me haven’t taken their shit down either.
And if I had the motivation and desire to troll as much as the people who made potato paraphernalia, I’d totally make signs, stickers and magnets of this Uncle Joe image I slapped together (above) in two seconds to post to my friends’ group chat. Frankly, I’d be okay if someone were to find this on the internet and do it themselves and receive no credit for it, because something like this should belong to the people. I’d love to see that image on cars, or signs in peoples’ yards, so that the sheep who voted for the potato could see Uncle Joe, pointing and laughing at them, and only them.
And with that, I’ve used up all remaining motivation and desire to write about the 2020 presidential election. I hope that this truly puts America on a path towards some degree of redemption, and puts ‘Murica back in to the shadowy recesses of shittiness in which it emerged from, and hopefully for a lot longer than it probably will. I’d like to raise my daughter in a world not run by the baked potato, and in spite of the few months of overlap, at least over the next four years, she’ll grow up with an actual grown-up running the country she was born into.
