A couple of post-election notes

(1) McConnell is lobbying Republican senators hard not to sign on to the objections that will certainly be lodged by dozens of House GOP members to the certification of the electoral vote in the swing states, when Congress meets for this purpose on January 6th.

Reminder: Electoral votes can only be tossed by Congress if both the House and the Senate each independently agree by majority vote to do so, which means of course that there’s no way for Republicans to do this, since Democrats will still hold a slim majority in the House when the new Congress convenes on January 3rd.

If even one senator joins the objecting House Republicans however, Congress is legally required to hold a public vote on which of its members are going to sign on to Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from him by the Democrats, the Dominion voting machines, Hugo Chavez, the Lizard People, the Wicca lesbian cult that secretly runs some of our major universities (but perhaps I’ve said too much), the fourth line of the 1987 Edmonton Oilers, and some other people whose identities must be kept secret for now.

My bet is that there’s no way McConnell can do this, and that we’re going to have a really interesting social science experiment regarding just how many of the most elite Republican elected officials in the country are going to officially sign on to Trump’s craziness (predictions in comments on how many House and Senate Republicans vote to toss out swing state electoral votes are encouraged).

(2) Now that the popular vote total appears to be final, I did a little figuring and came up with the following:

Percentage of eligible voters who voted for Biden:

33.9%

Percentage of eligible voters who didn’t vote:

33.8%

Percentage of eligible voters who voted for Trump:

31.02%

Percentage of eligible voters who voted for other candidates:

1.3%

The glass half-fullish view is that 66.2% of the voter eligible population voted, which was the highest percentage since 1908, when of course a much larger percentage of the population wasn’t eligible to vote, because Wicca hadn’t infiltrated our universities with its talismans and cancel culture.

The not so great news is that almost exactly two-thirds of Americans eligible to vote to remove Donald Trump from office didn’t do so, despite most states making it easier to vote in response to the pandemic.