How's Everyone Feeling Right Now?

If it makes you feel any better, it's highly unlikely that you can do anything at this point.

Saul Loeb/ AFP via Getty Images

The 2024 election is in 13 days—incredibly soon, approaching at a lightning-fast pace that seemed inconceivable just a few short months ago when the Democratic ticket got scrapped and remade into Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Democrats have run a last-ditch ad-hoc campaign to stave off a second Donald Trump administration, which would almost certainly be disastrous for the groups of Americans already victimized by our broken social order, as opposed to another Democratic administration, which will be slightly less disastrous but still pretty shitty for all those same people, and somewhat less stressful for everyone else.

The stakes, as they say, are high. And to make matters worse, the election itself is a tossup. It’s a wash. It will likely hinge on a razor’s edge, tipping to one side or the other with world-altering circumstances based on the minuscule influence of something as small as an early-year snow day in a suburb of Michigan that calls off school for the day. Who knows! Who can say!

Even the pre-eminent Predictors of our time have given up. Nate Silver, who shot to pasty poll guy fame after predicting the 2008 election, has spent years circling the drain of Crotchety Hot Takes and arrived, in this morning’s New York Times, at a position that’s basically: “beats me!”