Why would a sitting president need a non-scalable fence? Obviously the president sees unrest coming. Why?
I’m more resigned than worried. And honestly, I’d rather it be that way round. The UK is less dangerous and thanks to Brexit will only get more irrelevant.
Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Saddam Hussein.
Muamar Gaddafi.
Fair enough, it’s hard to believe what is going on here. It’s so chaotic that it’s easy to focus on just the latest outrage, but when you step back you realize it is a pattern of a GOP sponsored assault on American democracy.
There is a 5% chance of rolling a fumble in DnD (1 on a d20) It happens often enough th keep the game interesting. “Interesting” in this case as in Chinese curse.
Me, I’m picturing the final scene in The Day the Earth Caught Fire where in the press room of the newspaper the protagonist works for, two presses are loaded and ready to go, one with the headline, Earth Saved! and the other Earth Doomed!. The pressmen are waiting for the call from upstairs which press to start.
I’m going against the consensus. I am cautiously optimistic. Here are my opinions:
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More people will vote for Biden. The evidence here is clear. And it won’t just be a situation like 200 or 2016 where more people voted for the Democrat but the Republican was declared the winner because White Votes Matter. I think Biden will get the votes needed for an Electoral College win.
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Trump will try to steal the election. I feel this is a given. He’s pretty much said he will while claiming the Democrats will do it first. But I feel Trump’s efforts to steal the election will be executed as incompetently as every other action he has taken as President. So while I feel Trump will try to steal the election, I feel he will fail in that attempt.
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The Republican party is the wild card. While Trump and his administration are too incompetent to steal an election, the Republicans know what they’re doing. They are capable of planning and carrying out the theft of an election. That’s the real danger in the election. Will the Republican regulars decide to steal the election for Trump? Personally, my opinion is that they have decided not to. I feel they have decided that Trump isn’t worth the risk and they’re willing to let him lose. The signs are the Republican party is going in to opposition party mode.
Images of the President barricading himself in the White House, splashed across the TeeVee the day before the election. Great optics there.
Ceausescu has come up twice now this morning. God, what a mother fucker that guy was. I had forgotten all about him until I was watching a Rick Steves show about Romania.
But optics are as much projected as they are perceived. Even if it seems like folly, there is nothing to joke about here. We have a sitting president who is behaving and projecting authoritarian power. He isn’t just getting help from Putin, he’s increasingly behaving like an American version of him.
And I’ve voted every week for nearly two months now! Once for each of those $1200 stimulus checks that Trump bought my many votes with! 
And that is why I’ve been an alarmist. Trump is a blithering idiot when it comes to knowing the Constitution and history - he’s not an informed individual we can agree. But he understands power, and he is surrounded by people who understand the levers of power, even if he doesn’t.
Trump has a LOT riding on the line here. And worse, so do a lot of people inside his orbit. They are highly motivated to keep their power. For one thing, they’re most likely profiting off the taxpayer. For another, I suspect there’s a shit ton of grifting and graft that would be exposed if a legitimate DOJ investigation were to ever get started. They don’t just want to win; they have to win. How they win does not matter.
FiveyFox, is that you? 
Trump has surrounded himself with people who are as incompetent as he is. I think he doesn’t want to have anyone nearby who makes him look bad in comparison. So I dismiss the entire administration. Hell, Nixon couldn’t pull off Watergate and Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell were a lot smarter than anyone in the Trump administration.
The people I’m worried about are Republicans like McConnell. He knows what he’s doing. But McConnell doesn’t work for Trump. If anything it’s the other way around; Trump is basically a figurehead in what’s effectively the McConnell administration.
So the question is whether McConnell wants to keep Trump around for another four years. Or whether he decides he’ll do better running in opposition to Biden for four years. I feel McConnell (and the other Republicans whose opinions matter) have decided to let Trump go. And Trump wasn’t given a say in that decision.
But while I’m confident on my first two predictions, I’ll admit I’m not certain on this one. I feel the signs are there that the Republicans have decided to accept a Biden presidency. But unlike Trump, people like McConnell are smart enough to hide their intentions. They’re not going to talk about stealing an election beforehand. So I acknowledge it’s a possibility.
I hope you’re right, but to play Devil’s Advocate to your points:
The way the EC is set up, Biden can get many more popular votes, like 5 million or more, and still lose the EC. It comes down to a handful of swing states, that, as I mentioned, seem to be tightening up to within margin of error range as of this morning.
I still have bad memories of the 2000 election, and now there’s a 6-3 conservative majority on SCOTUS.
I’ve kept thinking too, these past 4 years, that the Repubs will finally come to their senses and push back against trump. But Lindsey Graham, and McConnell, and Barr, et al, keep seeming to be happy to play trump’s standard-bearer. You’d think, well, they won’t help him actually steal an election. But who thought Barr was going to go so far as become trump’s personal fixer? The depths that the whole R party has descended to is amazing.
…Cuz people are going to get mad if he is reelected…?
And if he’s defeated. There’ll be many in DC who will be impatient for January 20th…
I think McConnell is more than willing to ditch DJT, but he desperately wants to hang on to the Senate. So he can do a rerun of the “NO NO NOBAMA” years.
By my read, Biden has a lock on 335 Electoral College votes. Trump has 163 and 40 are too close to call.
This part of the reason I’m cautiously optimistic. This isn’t 1960 or 2000. Trump isn’t going to win by giving the election results a little nudge. He needs to give them a massive shove.
Graham is a sycophant and Barr has tied his fortunes to Trump. But while I’d loved to see McGrath win, I’m realistic; Mitch McConnell is going to remain a Senator regardless of whether Trump or Biden wins. So McConnell isn’t tied to Trump winning. So he’s free to make a decision about whether he benefits more from a Trump presidency or a Biden presidency and how much risk he’s willing to take to illegally influence the outcome.
We’ve seen this movie before. Remember what happened in the late lamented Soviet Union in late December 1991? They agreed that Gorbachev and the whole USSR would ride off into the sunset on Dec. 31, but instead Yeltsin stormed in and took over several days ahead of that.
Oh, I think I have this! I believe I do this about a lot of things, and this election is no exception.
I’m anticipating it being a very close election and trump will make all sorts of trouble, telling the highly partisan SC that no non-trump votes should be counted because they are all illegitimate and whatever other schemes he can come up with.
Pennsylvania and Florida are really worrying me. It would be awesome if Biden could flip my state, Texas, and pick up the 38 electoral college votes for a cushion of sorts, but that’s probably going to be close but no cigar.
The last couple of days have seemed to go on forever. Flashbacks to waking up in 2016 and seeing that trump had “won” are going through my head.