Polls Tightening?

Looks like the popular vote and all the blue wall races may be tightening up...but it all seems to be on the strength of a late Marist poll that is out of line with most of the other polls. Marist gets an A+ rating from 538...though 538 now leans even farther left than when Silver was running the show...so...who knows? I'm assuming that Marist leans left, since I don't know them to be right-leaning...and a left-lean is the standard (as in all things now). Media Bias / Fact Check gives it a least biased rating--which probably means it's somewhat left-leaning.

   If the late Marist poll is right, the Dems will win.

   Trump just needs to peel one of the blue wall states away...but I've read that they've voted together since '88 or something. So the new Harris lead in MI and WI, and the diminished lead in PA seem like very bad news.

   Of course, Trump's now positioned much better than he was in '16, and much much better than '20, when he barely lost.

   If the polls underrate him as badly as they did last time, he's fairly likely to win even given the Marist results.

   And, given that Marist is basically at odds with the RCP rolling averages...I'm guessing...and hoping...that they just botched the samples.

   Betting market average odds have reverted to Trump plus 20+, down from Trump + 30.

   It's hard not to be apprehensive given how important this election is, and how bad for the country a Dem win would be. But I'm trying to remain stoic about it.

   Another important factor is that, if the right gets Hillaried on this, they're going to lose their minds. I expect that'd make the Capitol riot look like church social. The fever swamps simply will not ever accept a loss on this one.

   I expect Trump to win. It's hard to look at the numbers and the history and the Dems and Harris and Walz and the campaign they are running...and come away expecting them to win. Trump's bad (in important ways), but they're terrible. And fake--or at least fake-seeming. Maybe, God help us, they're not...

   Anyway.

   I'd say we'll know on Tuesday...but some Democrat strongholds have already told us that they won't have the votes counted for...quite some time. This sort of anticipatory foot-dragging may be based on good reasons, or it may be to troll Republicans...or it may be an indication of shenanigans in in the offing. I just don't know what to think of it anymore. But I can't see how anyone can trust the system implicitly given what we know about it. I used to. But anomalies have piled up to such a point that I don't know what to think anymore. We know that the Dems cheat in ways that permit them to maintain plausible deniability. We know they're willing to engage in outright dirty tricks of great consequence. It's as if we have all the other pieces of the puzzle in place. We just don't know what the center looks like--don't know whether there's any outright cheating. Or, rather: we know for sure there is some--we just don't know whether there's enough that it might actually matter. This is an untenable state of affairs.

   It's insane that there weren't much more extensive investigations after '20. We needed to crush all the fraud hypotheses to restore faith in the system--not that I think it would be possible to do so completely given the swamps' inability to admit error. But we could have improved the situation a lot. And, in fact, the resistance to investigation by the blue team--and its preposterous insistence that it was "the most secure election ever"--leads otherwise-normal people like me to lose faith.