Last Minute Thoughts

Some scattered thoughts on election’s eve:

1. You hear a lot that this is the most important election of our time. But it’s not. The one four years ago was — we just didn’t know it. Bush turned out to be a radical President, and there’s no doubt that things would look very different today if it had been Gore. 2000 was the big kahuna. This is just the election where we have a clue.

2. Even if the electoral college vote is decisive one way or the other, even if the victor is established tomorrow night without question, we will remain a nation evenly divided. A mere 55/45 split is enough to put a state out of play; a 60/40 split marks a state as an unassailable stronghold for the candidate in question. That works for electoral math, but how does it work when it comes to livin’ with your neighbors? If there’s a hundred people on your block and sixty of them like baseball and forty prefer football, then there’s no talk of the majority “dominating” — it’s an evenly mixed neighborhood, where everyone has to just get used to living around people they disagree with. That’s where we are, and that’s where we’ll be, even after an electoral blowout.