Harry

We have Medicare in Australia. Everyone has it. You can pay extra for private health insurance which will cover you for dental and physio and get your access to a private hospital, but everyone has Medicare and can visit doctors for free, get medicine for cheap, have every issue covered and not be out of pocket much at all. We looked at Obamacare thinking it was pretty light on in comparison.

Mate Biden Obama and Clinton aren't very left wing, if you placed them into Australian politics they may even sit in our conservative party... The Sanders/AOC wing of the Dems is quite extreme but the establishment Dems have not been giving much ground to them.

This is way less close than Bush vs Gore. Bush win Florida and therefore the entire election by 156 votes Regarding how close it is don't forget Clinton lost by losing Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by less than 70k combined.

My concern all along is that all of trumps rubbishing of voter fraud being rife in mail/absentee ballots would: 1. Cause his people to try to do it, in order to "balance out" the inevitable mail fraud by democrats, 2. Cause democrats to go on record many times starting that mail voting is totally legit and that they'll 100% abide by the results of the election.

My god.

I've been worried about election fraud also... Democrats have gone on the record so many times this election saying it's not an issue. If some Republican group engaged in a large fraud operation they would have basically a library of quotes from democrats saying they respect the results

The problem is the way you count the vote in terms of postal and early votes vs election Day votes can create huge jumps on the tally which you've never had before. 100m ballots cast before the day.

I am doomscrolling on Twitter and it's doing me no good at all

The problem is the Pennsylvania count goes on for weeks... I was really hoping the states which do the count early would offer Biden a path to victory.

Yeah this is making me anxious. DO NOT want to go through a repeat of 2016. Need Florida to go for Joe otherwise might just switch off for a few hours

I really really hope Ossof and McBeth win their races. Ossof seems like a gun and those races will likely determine who has control of the senate. Yeah most of the South was blue but turned red after LBJ legislated African Americans the right to vote... Hence his famous quote "I fear we've lost the South for a generation".

What concerns me is the election Day count will likely be more Republican, and if they count that first and post that as progress numbers it will present as that trump is dominating in that state.... Knowing he wants to declare victory as early as possible that is a concern.

Fingers crossed for you mate. It had been nice to see Georgia looking competitive but it would be so huge for future elections if it actually turned blue tonight

By biggest pessimism about this election is that I doubt Dems take the senate. Which means they're fucked even if they win.

Yeah I'm pretty pessimistic. If Biden wins I suspect trump fans will continue to recognise him as president and he'll rule in exile and disrupt Biden big time throughout and be talking of running again in 2024. If trump wins it will be acrimonious because there's almost no chance that could occur without serious foul play. He's more than 8 points ahead and there are only 4% undecideds, compared to 14% in 2016. No James Comey bombshell, there's no reason the polls should move materially... Court interventions, voter intimidation and I'm tipping voter fraud from conservatives, will be unexpected surprises.

Trump has undermined his re-election effort with the extent of his lies... Honestly I think people are so sick of COVID that a more competent politician could exploit that to a broad coalition of people. But Trump's stance was overdone, and his lies were too extreme that they were always only going to speak to his narrow base

I agree. Pete Buttigieg was the only democratic candidate running on a to platform "our democracy is broken. We need to fix that before we try to do all the other stuff". It unfortunately hasn't been spoken about in the lead up to this election so they really have no mandate to fix any of that shit if they do win office.

Unfortunately there's a common denominator of Rupert Murdoch in both countries. I still mourn the America that could have been if Fox news hadn't called The state of Florida for Bush instead of Gore in 2000 when all other networks had called it the other way around. A conservative majority supreme Court decided the winner of the election. It could have been a huge turning point for America towards a more progressive future by breaking the pattern of rotation between parties every 8 years. that's really the point things started to unravel on the GOP side. It turned the Republicans towards winning by devious methods rather than just embracing some majority positions on some issues to broaden their appeal... That has seen them move them further and further to the right rather than back towards the centre.

I think some of that will come from the exponential type growth though and the fact lockdowns that took effect today won't drive down case numbers for about two weeks, and won't drive down hospital admissions for 3 weeks, and deaths for 4 to 6 weeks. But yeah it's way underreported that the first wave was unknown on size because most countries only tested those on deaths door. Although another point in that first wave was the mortality was higher because they didn't know how to treat it. The drugs trump was given, other than the stem cells are being used widely now and have seriously greatly improved the prospects of the very ill.

Who's going to want to be living in fear? Surely nobody. However they may believe it is necessary to go into another lockdown to lessen the burden of deaths coming along, which is reasonable.

Melbourne supposedly had an enormous contact tracing team, with around 5000 staff. However that team was totally overwhelmed by our peak of 700 cases per day, and was operating way below what they wanted to in terms of the time per contract tracer per case.... It wouldn't surprise me if your system was similarly overwhelmed and just struggling to be coherent or consistent at this point

I have so much respect for the government's who developed a clear strategy, were honest about what they were doing and why, and stuck to that strategy.... I think we've done that. Many Asian countries. Even Sweden, for all the criticism they copped, were at least honest about the fact they were willing to accept a halfway option based on sustainable restrictions and stuck with it despite being written up as pariahs... Most governments seen to have tried the accidental/dysfunctional Sweden... Avoid having the honest conversations and pretend everything is going to be rosy, and then reactively implement a lockdown really late in the piece presumably when they're at the limits of the health system capacity....

Recommend you read this with regard to the bit in bold. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10158069600551608&id=696981607&sfnsn=mo I found this quite illustrative, albeit an approximation of what would happen based on the models they use, with various types of protection measures toggled on and off.

Can't see them going back to the GOP. I think they'll run as independent or form a third party and try to peel moderates back from the GOP