The only thing worse than sitting through the weeks and months leading up to the election has been sitting through the vote count! 

I don't know about anyone else but I had to laugh when Trump went out in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday and declared himself the victor, when just a few days before the election Axios had reported that his plan was to declare victory on Election night and when he was asked about that he called it "fake news" and claimed he wasn't going to do that - and yet he did exactly that after all. He just can't help himself can he?!?!

It's truly disgusting though that he can't be respectful of the process though. We all knew well in advance of the election that several states would be counting for a while after polls closed because by their state laws they couldn't even start checking signatures on mail-in ballots until the day of the election or after polls closed and with so many people using the mail-in ballot option this year due to the pandemic it was going to take extra time to get results. We also all knew the same-day vote would lean Republican while the mail-in vote and early vote would lean Democratic, so this notion that only certain ballots should get counted based on some arbitrary decision of when they were delivered or how they were cast, especially when there were no rules against those methods prior to when the votes were cast and no one can truly say until they are opened how they were cast, is just ridiculous. 

I have more faith that Joe Biden has pulled it off at this point now that he's within striking distance of 270 with several paths to get there compared to Trump who almost needs to run the table on the remaining states in order to get past 270. Still cautious, but feeling a tad better than I did when I finally managed to get to bed early Wednesday morning. At least when it comes to the presidential race anyway...

But what happened with the Blue Wave 2.0? How did the Dems lose House seats and not manage to pick off more of the vulnerable Trump supporting GOP incumbents in the Senate? How were the polls - which were so steady pretty much all year long, multiple polls from multiple sources (including internal polls for various candidacies) - so off in their predictions? Certain races that were supposed to at least be competitive didn't wind up being all that close, some places were supposed to be runaways but ended up being decided by a much narrower margin than any poll (Democratic, Republican, or neutral-sourced) ever foretold all year long? Millions were poured into some of these campaigns beause polling showed them to be competitive and yet, Dems have little to show for those millions spent in those cases. So are polling methods too flawed now to ever matter anymore? Are there ways to rectifiy it in the future? Will anyone beleive another poll ever again even if they do try to fix those kinks seeing how they supposedly already fixed the kinks found in the polling in 2016?

Okay lastly, how are you feeling about this year's election? Are you happy with the overall results? Is it what you expected?