The Lyin' in Winter

 

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images via Business Insider.

We're at this bizarre moment when Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff winning the Georgia Senate seats—both of them—suddenly starts to seem conceivable. One thing is those exit poll numbers from 3 November:

Washington Post.

Biden won just 30% of the white vote (up from 21% for Clinton in 2016), but that was enough, combined with the overwhelming preference of Black and Latino voters, if only because there were so many of the latter, testimony to the extraordinary work of Stacey Abrams and thousands of people like her getting out the vote in historic proportions (not just minority members but also anybody under 45, who preferred Biden by 53% to 44%). 

But some Georgia Republicans are blaming Trump for depressing white turnout with his attacks on ballot security, and may now be making it worse for the GOP Senate candidates by insisting that it's still his election the voters should be worried about

Trumpfendämmerung

 

The original Zoom debate, from the Democratic primary campaign in New York's 14th congressional district, 20 May 2020, screenshot by Mashable.

No, I'm not going to waste my time on a virtual debate. That's not what debating's all about. You sit behind a computer and do a debate is ridiculous. And they cut you off whenever they want.

Donald J. Trump, 8 October, rejecting the format proposed by the Commission on Presidential Debates for the scheduled 15 October town hall–style debate in Miami, after Trump's Covid-19 infection raised safety concerns. I can't find out anything about the role computers were supposed to play in the proceedings—the CPD's statement didn't mention this—but it must have been discussed in the course of the CPD negotiations with the two campaigns, and that's where Trump got it.

My idea is that it was really going to be a Zoom debate, as suggested originally by Mashable and later backed up by Fox Business, Vice, Catholic University's The Tower, and I don't know who else—Fox was the most authoritative, citing Mitch McConnell and the Trump campaign's Mica Mosbacher—and Trump was thrown into a panic, not by the thought that the moderator was going to have a mute button (he's accepted that, at least for part of the time, for Thursday's debate), but because he might have to operate one himself; that he might be required to touch a key or click a mouse, hands at the console and face at the camera, and he was certain he would screw it up.