Stop Pissing Your Pants, You Pissbabies

I saw someone online this week say Republicans are most confident when they're losing and Democrats are most fretful when they're winning. And man, that feels awfully fucking correct right now.

I'm not proud to say I still scour Elon Musk's fascism machine at least a couple times and day, and every time I do – no matter what I'm looking for – I come away sweaty and panicky, convincing to my core that Donald Trump will win the 2024 election in a landslide. Everyone on X, whether they love Trump or hate him, is certain he's going to win back the presidency.

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The reality Musk – whose depression has come to define the 2020s – has created for himself and his pathetic hangers-on is one in which Trump glides back into the White House with well over 300 electoral votes (I'm convinced Musk appeared with Trump in Pennsylvania last week to boost Trump's chances in the election betting markets, dominated by crypto bros who adore Musk and may be running a complex "pump and dump" scheme with political betting markets).

You and I ingest Musk's poison every time we log in to his awful little online fiefdom. He's making us sick. He makes the world sick.

Musk's reality has bled into every social media platform. That includes BlueSky, which got a massive influx of new folks this week after X changed its terms of service in the worst possible ways. Every hour of every day, people on BlueSky are doing some combination of shitting and pissing their pants. Sometimes it's a little of both.

I want you to know that I understand the gravitational pull toward doomerism. I am a born doomer, someone for whom nihilism comes naturally. I fight this pulsating doomer urge because it's unhelpful and unproductive and fucks up my head and ruins my mood and makes me generally impossible to be around. I've tried over the past couple months to help pull folks away from the doomer magnet that sits in their brains, traumatized by election night 2016.

So let's begin with your weekly doomer deprogramming.

I need to be real with you here. Kamala Harris winning the election while narrowly losing the popular vote would be – as the zoomers might say – the funniest thing ever. Just imagine Republicans getting a taste of winning the most votes and losing the election. It would be delicious.

The Fox poll, usually among the most reliable, is all over the place. It has Harris winning just two-thirds of the black vote, Trump with a healthy lead among college-educated white folks, and Harris dominating with non-college educated voters. None of that makes any sense to me.

I know I've given the New York Times' Nate Cohn a hard time of late. Maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, Cohn has pushed the data-driven theory that big blue states like California and New York are becoming much less blue – not worryingly so – while the middle of the country trends ever bluer. We saw this in the 2022 midterms. Maybe it's a new wrinkle in our Trump-driven political reality.

In Pennsylvania, publicly available voting information says 66 percent of the votes cast so far have been from Democratic voters, with Republicans at 25 percent. This isn't a shock, of course, but look a little closer and you might spot some data that illustrates enthusiasm among Democrats.

In Michigan, where 40 percent of the 284,000 early votes cast so far have come from registered Democrats, election watchers are noting the heavy early voting turnout. That includes Detroit, where 95 percent of people backed Joe Biden in 2020.

Probably your inner doomer missed some key Reuters data measuring voter enthusiasm in the earliest days of voting. It seems like a positive sign for the Harris campaign.

Some 78% of registered voters in the three-day poll - including 86% of Democrats and 81% of Republicans - said they were "completely certain" they would cast a ballot in the presidential election. The share of sure-to-vote poll respondents was up from 74% in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Oct. 23-27, 2020, when 74% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.

Underlying data shows young voters are lagging in enthusiasm metrics, to which I would say buck up, zoomers. Shed your layers of protective irony and understand this is not a game, and that national campaigns don't have to coddle you and bend to your every whim to earn your vote. Stop your flirtation with fascism before it's too late. Doing so would make you "sigma" or whatever.

Finally, and most delightfully, we have numbers showing Americans once again hate JD Vance's fucking guts after a brief moment in which voters seemed to warm up to the bearded midwife of all-out fascism in the United States.

It's not quite as bleak for Vance as those glorious summer days in which vast swaths of the American electorate joked about Vance having biblical relations with his couch, but it's awfully close.

Chin up. And stop pissing your pants every day. Things aren't as bad as Elon Musk would have you believe.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social