Ode to the US Election

Scylla and Charybdis. Either screwed, or blued and tattoed. Fanatic bigoted zealots vs. wishy washy apolitique warmongers. The main dish of the international political landscape is upon us. With two wars still in full swing, reason says this might be an important one too, although neither party seems particularly interested in peace. We come up with an extremely unscientific method to predict the winner.

There exists an almost intrinsic tendency in most of us to consider the future inescapable and predetermined. Most progressions in human history are given perfectly fit explanations, often in ways that render them inevitable in our brains. One thing leads to another, one unresolved conflict comes to a head; revolution isn’t exactly fueled by eras of prosperity. Even upsets and surprises make perfect sense in retrospect, with people forgetting how ridiculously wrong their earlier predictions were. In politics, corruption and greed from ostensible social democratic forces leads to economic disaster, which in turn fosters the rise of authoritarian monsters. Brief stints with such unhinged candidates scares normies, and they revert back to voting for more liberal people, even if secretely despising them. Like Vonnegut would say, …and so it goes..

Despite wholly disagreeing with the predestined future theory, we’ll make an attempt to figure out the winner via formulaic devices. Instead of waiting for the result to then proclaim “of course”, we shall produce 11 arbitrary, yet extremely significant parameters which might make-or-break victory. The number 11 is chosen due to its being an odd number, thus breaking ties, as well as for offering a perfect enough sample size (not so big that each factor is negligible, not so small so as to think that only a few factors can really predict the president). Special emphasis will be placed on simple statistics and numbers, but emotions, narratives, along with the factor of human malaise and stupidity will all be heavily considered. Without further ado:

PARAMETER #1: HISTORICAL PRECEDENCE

Once upon a time, the Republican party was formed to fight against the expansion of slavery. A majority of Democrats, on the other hand, were slave owners. Many white southerners got so pissed with Abraham Lincoln’s (also a Republican) emancipation of slaves gig, that, for the next 100 years, they identified as Democrats out of spite. What constitutes ‘red’ states today was effectively the product of a malevolent transformational trick carried out as part of The Southern Strategies by Eisenhower – basically convincing good ol’ ‘Murcans there were Soviet spies all over the US and within the Dems- and later Nixon, fueling racism and white supremacy ideals to vanilla peasant folk.

The point here is that as much as patterns rule the world, in politics they are not exactly transhistorical. Exceptions take their time but eventually become the rule. Digging for patterns in smaller sample sizes is thus often a fool’s errand. All that said, patterns don’t necessarily involve actual ideological notions or partywide alterations. They can act as plain indicators of certain things likely or unlikely to happen based on a little thing called probability. After a deep and rather incessant coincidence/pattern/history search, the most interesting aspect relative to historical precedence was unfortunately the same thing that ChatGPT pointed towards:

There has only been one guy to win, lose, then win again. Dude by the name of Cleveland Glover. Does that mean Trump needs a Herculean effort against history? Well, Glover is somehow also the only guy to ever come back for re-election after having lost. So instead of the narrative being: ‘Trump is trying to do something only done by 1 other person before’, it’s actually ‘only one guy ever tried to do this, and he won’. By all means, Glover was a more decent bloke than Donald. But there are some other fascinating similarities. They are both New Yorkers (WOW!). Both entered politics rather abruptly and randomly(BOOM!). They were/are both not big fans of China and/or Chinese migrants (Ok, that one is funnier, if not meaningful). In an inverse type similarity, Glover lost his 2nd attempt at presidency despite winning the popular vote, whereas Trump won his first attempt despite losing the popular vote(mehh).

Biden’s de-facto resignation deprives us of many other potential patterns (70% of prez since 1900 being reelected, presidential rematches, people winning elections despite fighting dementia etc). Kamala’s Vice Presidency card seems meaningless. 15 Vice Presidents have managed to become POTUS (8 of whom did so because of prez deaths), whereas 11 tried and failed. Sounds like a coin toss on that front. I genuinely tried hard to find semi-coincidental iterations that would point towards the winner. Yet all we’re left with is this Cleveland guy.

Edge: Trump

PARAMETER #2: THE INFAMOUS POLLS (BUT ONLY WHERE IT MATTERS)

Whether polls ever really were reliable, or it’s one of those ‘fetishization of the past’ ideas is controversial. Has the last decade been a nightmare for data analysts and pollsters? Or is the fabrication of bullshit polls just an effort by the deep state to influence voters? At any rate, polls’ monumental failure at catching the vibe of the voters during an age of unlimited possibilities and technology is somewhat hilarious, if not downright disappointing. Pollsters are back with a vengeance in 2024, saying they are going to take all past mistakes into account and finally deliver meaningful and correct stats to the people.

Let’s get the basics out of the way. Popular vote ain’t mean much in the US. Any article click-baiting you with a headline of “Kamala leading by 2, 3, 4” is doodley-squat. As you’ve probably already heard repeatedly, a sheer majority of total votes literally means nothing. The result essentially comes down to 5-10 states, depending on the year/era. As we explained in the previous section, what constitutes swing states can come and go based on parties’ ideological allegiance, strong propaganda campaigns or demographics (e.g. Ohio used to be a Democrat-leaning swing state until 2012, but has turned into a lopsided red state). The above two facts lead us to two insights: i) The only polls that matter are those in a small number of unpredictable states, & ii) we will only be looking at states which have been swing ones in the past few elections, aka our current era that also takes into account social media prevalence.

To help explain the comical tankjob of polls regarding Trump’s popularity in terms of voting back in ’16 and ’20, people came up with the ‘shy Trump voter effect’, essentially meaning that a number of Trump aficionados either don’t wanna answer to polls, or stay outside of polls’ ways for other reasons. I’m not here to argue whether or not that phenomenon reflects the truth, although I suspect it does to some extent. On the other hand, Obama’s percentages were also underrated relative to result back in ’08 and ’12. Could it simply be that most polls are overrepresented by white middle class folk, and ostracizing both a) working class white trash (just joking) and/or b. Hispanics and Blacks? Any serious analyst would deem me an idiot for even suggesting misrepresentation of class, gender or ethnic group in polls.

Let’s get to the end of this by having a look at a table demonstrating 2016 and 2020 polling errors in the current version of swing states (Ohio is only included here for reference):

Now let us quickly consult the latest polling averages (as of 28 September). For simplicity, we’ll just take the average polling error from the last two elections and make a pathetic attempt to predict the final results for November:

We can discard Florida as it appears Trump has won that one comfortably; it’s also not considered a swing state for 2024. We can add Nevada, as it is the swing state of today, which Kamala also seems to win comfortably and past polls have predicted correctly. Thus far, it’d be Kamala 1-0. But man oh man. The rest looks positively bleak! Again, this only takes into account means from polling errors in the last two elections, but if history were to repeat itself a third time, then we are talking about a blowout of gigantic proportions on the side of Donnie.

It becomes apparent that what most media mask as landslide Kamala leads in critical swing states is predicated on the belief that polls will not be as wrong as they were in ’16 and ’20. And the million dollar question remains: Have the pollsters fixed their prediction models after two straight abysmal performances? For now we can only take counsel from the patterns created by the last two elections.

Edge: Trump

PARAMETER #3: THE DEBATE(S)

We’ll try and keep this one short, because that ‘cats and dogs’ gig has me truly sceptical of whether Trump really wants to win the election, or he’s been blackmailed to run and lose in exchange for his charges to be dropped. Let’s consult another table, where we look at general consensus’ winners of presidential debates since 1980, next to actual result:

Now, I’m not sure how objectively consensus is measured, and I wasn’t born/at conscious age/spoke English when most of these went down, but that’s beside the point. So is whether a certain candidate got a cute treatment by the moderators, press coverage etc. Propaganda be damned, we are looking at public opinion and how it was shaped to think. The only point we are interested in here is ‘who won according to public perception’. Back to today, no matter how biased the whole gig may have looked, nobody in their right mind would say Trump actually won the 2024 debate. If anything, he passed signals he might be getting dementia at an earlier age than Biden did.

And whoa is this clear! Debate winners-or in the case of 3 debates, winners of the majority of the debates conducted- have gone on to win 100% of the time since 1980!

Edge: Harris

PARAMETER #4 – ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS

One should firstly state the obvious: Trump’s assassins couldn’t shoot a bullet in the Pacific. There are many enthralling conversations to be had about the motive of assassins, how they managed to get past security twice in such a short span, whether it’d be better for the whole wide world if they succeeded, whether the CIA was involved, whether the Ukrainian paramilitary specifically trains commandos to destroy underwater pipelines and assassinate presidential figures. Fortunately or unfortunately, all of the above are impertinent.

For a second there was a lot of talk about how the assassination was an excellent publicity stunt that could award Trump the win. His galliant reaction to both was meant to win him emotional points and convince even his biggest haters that he’s a tough nut. Prediction-wise, such utterations are problematic. The issue here is we are entering uncharted territories. Most assassination attempts on US presidents/aspiring presidents either i) succeeded, ii)were made when someone was undergoing their win hangover, or iii)when someone was fucking up in virtue of being President. It may seem hard to believe, when one considers all the despicable human beings that have tried to be POTUS, but unsuccessful assassination attempts on people that are not yet presidents (granted: Trump already served at a past time) are not a thing.

Judging by how little people seem to care or want to talk about the multiple assassination attempts on Trump, we can postulate that this one won’t play a big role. But really, is there any chance it reduces his chances? Think about it this way: Would someone considering a Trump vote be dissuaded to vote for him because somebody tried to kill him?

I’ll leave you with a couple of charts with American polls post-assassination attempt before settling on a decision:

Source: Here

I have no idea what the ear incident graph thing is supposed to mean, but I’m putting it here because it’s funny none of their editors picked up on this nonsense before or after printing it. So yeah, it’s no guarantee that the assassinations will help him. It’s no guarantee anyone will remember them by November, considering our fleeting news world where we scroll past genocides and neglect who perpetrators and who victims are. But it almost certainly won’t hurt him.

Edge: Trump

PARAMETER #5 – BOOKIES AND BETTORS

The sceptical reader might say this is pretty much the same as Parameter #2. Nonetheless, bookies don’t simply call upon numbers; they don’t necessarily overthink the extent of polling errors in an arbitrarily chosen time period; since a whole lot of cash money is at stake, they turn to emotional swings, diverse sources of information, and most importantly, do not seek to sway public opinion. They probably have spreadsheets listing a bunch of parameters similar to the overarching idea of this very post that I’m writing. In a nutshell, they seek to make more or at least lose less dough.

One weakness of odds is that they can be influenced by oligarch sharks, or plainly crazy degenerate bettors. For example, if Elon Musk is busy placing huge bets on his friend Donnie, that could have a disproportionate impact where the bookies think one thing, but have to adjust to the market in a contrasting manner. To put it in comprehensible terms, even though bookies can’t sway opinion, big-pocket bettors can!

I won’t tire you with more numbers in a parameter that could drown in them, but the point is rather clear, given the two-party system in the US: the favorite usually wins. Relative favouritism, however, isn’t quite that simple, as we’ll demonstrate next. There is a rather crazy stat whereby although favorites with odds of -175 or better are 26-2(.867) in U.S. presidential elections, favorites with odds of -150 or longer are 1-6 (.143). Let me quickly explain that to those who are not degenerate gamblers. For the past 35 elections, if you are a heavy heavy favourite, aka everyone knows you’ll win, you have something like a 90% chance of taking it down. However, if you are a favourite in a battle deemed to be very close, you have a 15% chance of winning, albeit with a tiny sample size of 7 such matchups. Of those two upsets in the 26-2 streak, one was Trump’s shocker against Clinton. Only one other prez other than Trump has therefore beat immensely discouraging odds on his way to that ugly office. Kamala’s current odds are at 10/11, exactly the sort of balanced favouritism that tends to be deleterious to a candidate.

What can we infer? 1)Well, US elections are normally lopsided affairs. 2)Close elections are the exception rather than the rule. 3)Being a heavy favourite is a good indication you’ll win. 4) MOST IMPORTANTLY, being a borderline favourite is a shit sign for you. So the question now becomes: Is the latter a fluke, or does it reflect some sort of hidden reality? I would tend towards the second, namely, that when someone is only favourited slightly, in spite of being thought to be clear favourites, there is good reason for the oddsmakers to doubt the common opinion. They can’t help but be influenced by the overarching opinion of the many, yet they are crunching numbers that tell a story not consistent with logic or common conviction.

As aforementioned, the odds at this moment could of course also just be contingent on Elon Musk throwing big sums in a peculiar effort to influence worldwide odds-setting. I’m gonna go ahead and do a zag here and go against the numbers. If Donnie beat awful odds against Clinton, normal distribution says he could suffer a loss here despite Kamala’s slight favouritism seeming to be in his favour. One woman losing against favourable odds —>Another woman winning against unfavourable odds.. As the ancient Greek philosophers claimed: “Fool me once; shame on you, fool me twice; shame on me”.

Edge: Harris

PARAMETER #6- IDENTITY POLITICS

There’s regions where racism and sexism still bloom. There’s countries where racism is more prevalent than sexism (looking at you Northern Europe). There’s places where conscious and subconscious misogyny is more prevalent than racism (oh hey there, rest of the world). Is America ready for its second Black president? Is America ready for its first female president? How about its first Black female president?

One of Trump’s biggest cards has been his outsider status. Some are just excited to vote for someone who wasn’t in the political game since the day they left college, and therefore a candidate who hasn’t been around the corrupt and greedy tables long enough to know how to play the game (you may laugh here, but public opinion, ’tis what ’tis). Now he’s no longer the interloper candidate whose supposedly pure anti-politics backdrop renders him fresh. Kamala will and should sport the ‘was never supposed to be here’ card, motivating indifferent voters to go to the booth.

Harris is understandably more popular with LGBT communities, with women, with people of colour as well as most migrant groups (perhaps for no good reason, considering her reported immigration policy is not far away from Trump’s misanthropic one). Effectively, the numbers question here can be formulated as such:

# of individuals who vote Democrat although they normally wouldn’t bother, only in virtue of Harris’ background > # of individuals who will vote Republican only based on their contempt for Harris’ background/love for Trump’s background. Considering Biden’s disadvantages on many identity politics domains, it feels more than reasonable to presume that Harris will attract a decent amount of people who otherwise wouldn’t leave their couch.

Edge: Harris

PARAMETER #7- PERPETUATION OF WAR

There are strong indications that Americans are no longer stoked about spreading democracy to the rest of the world. General support for intervention in Ukraine has plummeted, regardless of whether people think it’s a proxy war or an inescapable progression in post-Soviet affairs. As we’ll argue in the next section, the primary motivation force in any country’s voting behaviour is people’s pockets. If most people are fooled into thinking their pocket is doing well, parties remain popular; if not, they lose their glamour.

The low heights reached by the current administration in its handling of global violence? We could go on for days. America’s rep got so inevitably bad, that Blinken didn’t even flinch while saying the Ukraine war is actually helping the job market thrive, confessing its beneficial effects to the US economy. If that isn’t the most blatant admission of the military-industrial complex since the start of modern times, not sure what is. Now, whether the 99.9% of taxpayers who are funding Netanyahu’s and Zelensky’s weapons care much about the 0.1% who work within these industries and whose financial prosperity has blossomed, that’s a story for another time.

Would Trump really help stop the atrocities? Hmm. Even if he and his old buddy Vladimir agreed on a de-escalation that somehow satisfied both sides enough to call it quits, his well-documented Islamophobic stance would render US’ reaction in the Middle-east a trigger happy roulette. From the Democrats’ viewpoint, Israel could not have found a worse time to commit genocide in Gaza. Although it’s more or less guaranteed that the US would bend over to their biggest ally’s every demand regardless of who’s in the oval office, the point here is that an ostensibly centre-left (laughing out loud) power has been consistently supporting the mass extermination of children and women unashamed.

Granted, US participation in Ukraine and Gaza is more indirect than explictly sending thousands of troops. Guess they must have learned a lesson or two. Yet their awful foreign policy via the billions spent towards augmenting the conflicts doesn’t bide well for Dems’ general stature and prestige. The Vietnam War dethroned Lyndon Johnson, NATO involvement in the Balkans and Somalia helped oust Clinton, Bush’s Iraq debacle bore Obama, and Obama’s inability to stop pointless death and torture got us Trump. Of course, this is only a reductive way to measure impact of foreign intervention and war proliferation, but who would argue that Gaza hasn’t alienated and driven away human-rights supporting individuals?

Edge: Trump

PARAMETER #8 – SO CALLED MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES OF COUNTRY

Careful. This section has nothing to do with logic, being humane, or what the actual issues that should bug people in 2024 are. It’s about what reportedly shapes and decides elections and what most people’s attitude towards such issues is. Sad as it is, we are still arguing about the right of people to freely move between countries searching for better livelihoods, whether 1 month old or 3 month old fetuses are sentient, & whether strengthening surveillance in schools and empowering police in educational institutions is meaningful.

Let us take the bait and agree to assess candidates’ chances based on the things that normally keep Americans awake. As aforementioned, no matter what statistics you consult, the economy will always rank #1 when it comes to the most critical factor to an American’s voting decision. Nothing even comes particularly close, with some numbers showing it top the rankings at 40%, with immigration a distant second at 17%.

Instead of looking at who most Democrats and who most Republicans deem better at tackling these high-importance issues, let’s take affiliation out of the equation and look at the general vote-registered American public. The following chart can help us visualize where each candidate’s trustworthiness on a number of statistically-significant proclaimed issues points.

Source: Here:

Now, I’m not saying that bringing the country closer together is not a meaninful societal aspect, but the way it plays in American heads, it’s simply not as significant as economic or foreign policy. Also granted, Democrats are taking steps to reach the fascistic tendencies of Republicans when it comes to building walls and deporting people, increasing their popularity among the blood thirsty. A lot of ‘others’ I associate with think that Harris’ stance on abortion will be enough to mitigate her disadvantages elsewhere. Feasible. Along with the identity politics swing, it’s within the realm of possibility that Republicans’ idiotic, outdated takes on this single issue could spell their doom. But given their reluctance to advertise that opinion in pre-election campaigns as much as they used to, promoting a less strict message of ‘We’ll see’, may just bode in their favour.

Trump’s real or fabricated image in the economy and immigration domains simply cannot be ignored. The initial economic growth and low unemployment during his first three years of presidency before COVID hit is almost undeniable even in liberal press, regardless of how he managed to get there.

Edge: Trump

PARAMETER #9 – SOCIAL MEDIA EFFECT

It’s become conspicuous that contemporary US elections’ campaigning doesn’t so much revolve around showing why one is worth the vote, but rather focusing efforts on why your opponent is even worse than you. The most spectacular such circus went full throttle in the 2016 election, where an entire debate was devoted to Clinton and Trump apologizing about all the abhorrent things they had said, done, or emailed.

Most social media channels have turned into the worst forms of cesspits. People have picked up on it, so it’s unlikely they would be as influenced by paid-for propaganda from either party. Yet just because they won’t exert as much sway as SM did in the prehistoric times of ’16 and ’20, doesn’t mean that they’ll have zero effect on voting. Candidates can still use fearmongering techniques to invade poor undecided folks’ subconscious. Vote for Kamala? Mexicans and Venezuelans will march into your homes, steal your daughters, jobs, tractors and catdogs. Vote for Trump? This was your last opportunity to vote and America will devolve into a monarchy. Stocks will re-collapse and you’ll lose access to your hard earned money.

At any rate, Harris’ positive engagement on the mother of all social media trash, aka TikTok, may suggest a lot of young first-time voters could make their trip to the private booth. In what is probably a shocking development, considering the state of things, voter turnout has been increasing over the past few elections. On a state-by state comparison, people in the age range 18-29 had higher turn-out rates in liberal states than in Southern states. If this continues and more youngsters are encouraged to change their attendance patterns, it’s pretty likely that Harris will reap the benefits more than Donnie.

Edge: Harris

PARAMETER #10 – THE ROBIN FACTOR: VICE PRESIDENTS

Do note this column is being written before the VP debate on Oct.2. Sure, Walz seems like he’s gonna manage to grab Minnesota for Kamala. It’s pretty impressive too, considering the guy can’t even get his own family to support him. He’s best known for calling Trump and his people ‘weird’, somehow sparking a movement of excitement about ousting Trumpism through… the word ‘weird’. He also made a name in virtue of restrictive COVID policies during his time as a Minny governor, prompting libertarian press to call him a tyrant. Just a note: I’m not saying anyone should take libertarians more seriously than average Republicans or Democrats. In fact, to set the record straight, you should take everything passionate supporters of all the above groups say with a huge sack of salt. Did I mention the guy can’t even convince his own family to keep MAGA pics out of twitter?

Vance, on the other hand, is almost a celebrity for the American working class. He authored Hillbilly Elegy, the book-turned-film best known for breaking the record of biggest discrepancy between critic and crowd ratings (24% to 81%, if you don’t feel like clicking links). He’s a good Christian, and for all matters and purposes, seems to have an IQ double that of old companion Mike Pence. Of course, he couldn’t be a red boy if he was particularly fond of illegal aliens or if he supported women’s right to do whatever the f*** they want with their bodies.

I’m sorry, there’s not that much to say about these two. Walz is passionate about education [just not enough to fix the derisory US college system] and healthcare [people can’t get sick if they don’t go outside!]; Vance is passionate about our right to kill people with guns, so long as they’re not fetuses. Scepticism for Walz focuses on his inability to convince his cousins to vote blue, where scepticism for Vance is that Chat GPT wrote his book, and in fact he himself is a 3D printed robot whose opinions don’t diverge a centimeter from your average Republican. We’ll just be boring here and give it to the one that polls say is a little bit more popular than the other.

Edge: Harris

PARAMETER #11 – HOW DOES THE FRINGE VOTE

For ideological and moral superiority reasons, the average person would say most Trump supporters have fringe characteristics. Sorry, but a third of the population of a country cannot be rendered fringe. To avoid confusions, we’ll redefine ‘fringe’ as the small chunk of Americans who don’t identify with the mainstream in any way, shape or form. Fringe, of course, does not imply all independents or non-voters either, as that proportion is nearly 40% of the country. They could be members of the intelligentsia community, or they could be members of the radical side of the tinfoil hat spectrum community. Most people on the fringe, to make it absolutely perspicuous, would normally not vote for either party, either because they’re smart enough to know the level of corruption inherent in both, or because they think Trump and Kamala are lizards.

I get it. Robert Kennedy’s move wasn’t all that impactful. The nepotist buff bro would struggle to get more than 2% if he ran on his own. The majority of what he says might border on senseless, but there’s also other things where he’s so immaculately right that you wonder if he’d make for the most honest POTUS in the history of time. This is not a compliment by the way. But for a moment, before expressing devotion to Israel, he was one of the very few guys the country’s political scene produced that was backed to an almost equal extent by left wingers (thanks to his environmental devotion, questioning war, fighting extreme COVID regulations) as well as by right wingers (unclear notions on abortion, anti-immigrant stance, conspiratorial mindset). For an election that could hinge on the 1%s in some states, RFK’s otherwise meaningless backing of Donnie could play a role against all odds.

And who did Kamala snatch to back her, following Kennedy’s flip? Dick fucking Cheney. Bush’s right hand throughout the execution of the most idiotic war of the last 200 years. If there’s five guys that could give Kissinger a run for his money in terms of transhistorical criminal impact, Cheney is on that list. I mean, that son of a gun passionately lobbied against the freeing of Nelson Mandela in his youth days. He advocated for torture, shot his own friend by accident, and has generally taken a deuce over anything you ever deemed beautiful. It’s just never a good idea to accept an endorsement from such a bloke. It’s not simply questionable that the blues are ok with it, it’s a calamity that further illustrates what deep-state humbugs they can be.

There’s too many people excessively disillusioned with the hypocricy of Democrats, and a lot of the above parameters demonstrate it. Who Trump and his passionate followers are has been out in the open ad nauseam. Nobody votes for him because they secretly believe he’s a good person. On the other hand, kind-natured intelligent people have thought that voting Democrat is a sensible thing to do for decades. And that may and should be changing by the day. I’m not naive enough to think the wake-up call of Gaza or general proliferation in what concerns war will bring upon the end of the two-party system, but do get the feeling that copious objectively sound people would never vote for either party unless there was a gun to their mother’s head. On the other side of the fence, the strange chunk of fringe people would not think twice about popping it on Trump.

It’s just regrettable that no force to oust the two-party system could ever appear from the shadows. If 30% votes Dem, 30% votes Rep, and 40% doesn’t go vote, it feels like there is another outcome that could have been brewing throughout all those greed-fueled decades. Either way, not much hope for this country and its reasonable people, and by extension, given their overlordship on the rest of the Earth, for all of us.

Edge: Trump

TLDR: Trump 6 – Harris 5

Hey, I’m not stoked either, it’s only what this arbitrary parameters project says. If nothing else, provided he doesn’t declare himself into a modern day Caesar, we’ll get some more laughs out of it. At least the ones of us living in Europe. To give you a tiny glimmer of hope, a lot of these factors hang on a thin thread; it could be 8-3 or 4-7 next time you wake up.

Aaand so, in spite of it all, we’re going ahead with our first unhinged prediction: Trump wins the 2024 Presidency.