8 hours to go...I wanna be sedated | Will Bunch Newsletter

A few weeks back, I told you Philly sports had given me a great fall, and yet was possibly setting me up for, um, a great fall. That tumble came on Nov. 5 when the Union and the Phillies made us the first city to lose two major pro championships on the same day. But we do have a dude who ate a whole rotisserie chicken for 40 days in a row, because in this town we’ve learned to define “winning” a bit differently.

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Tuesday is a great day for sending out your weekly newsletter — except when that Tuesday is Election Day. Almost all of you are reading this before the polls close, on a day that’s like the Super Bowl Sunday of politics — except here at halftime you don’t even know the score. So we’re going to continue a tradition we started in this space in 2020, of calling this missive Part 1. You’ll be getting an alert when I publish Part 2, which will be a column about 2022′s winners and losers, and what it all means for the American Experiment.

In the last few election cycles, that column was rushed to meet a Tuesday night deadline for the next morning’s print newspaper — based on too-early results that gave a misleading picture of what the final results would be. So this year, I’m not writing until we at least know who’s controlling Congress next year — which hopefully will be sometime tomorrow.

Because let’s be honest: Right now at midday Tuesday, nobody knows anything, and even at 10 p.m. tonight we may not know a lot.

That hasn’t stopped some of my big-time colleagues from twisting like pretzels to meet their pre-conceived narratives. Over at the New York Times and Politico, the in-crowd reporters are posting analyses as if a Democratic bloodbath — for which, to be mildly fair, there is historical precedent — has already occurred. Politico even wrote a doom-and-gloom-for-Democrats piece after its own commissioned survey showed Dems surging to a 5% lead on the generic congressional ballot — dismissing its own poll as obviously “an outlier.”

I’m not going to play that game. To be sure, I’ve written several columns about the GOP efforts — paid for by secret billionaire dark money — that have used fear-mongering over crime or immigration to appeal to suburban voters, especially women, and how that tried-and-true scare tactic seems to be working. On the other hand, I’ve also noted that young people can change an election when they show up — as they did for President Joe Biden in 2020 — and how losing abortion rights and gaining some student-debt cancellation is motivating these voters.

So I’m going to say something a journalist never says these days: We’re just going to have to wait and see.

I will say something else that matters. If you are registered to vote and have not done so yet, what are you waiting for? There are folks out there (cough, cough...Republicans) who are champing at the bit to take the right to vote away from you. Exercising your civic franchise isn’t just the best revenge, it’s the only revenge.

Needless to say, The Inquirer has been a font of information this year about how to vote and whether your vote is going to be counted — along with all the news stories and opinion pieces you need to help you make an informed voting decision.

You’ll definitely want to follow The Inquirer’s live election blog, which is being constantly updated today and will continue to be refreshed as results come streaming in tonight. There’s a ton of useful information in our 2022 voters’ guide. And here’s information on what to do if you mess up your ballot, or experience problems at your polling place. There’s even our best guess on how long it will take to have results here in Pennsylvania, where it took nearly five days to declare the presidential winner in 2020.

I also want to celebrate my colleagues on the Inquirer Opinion team for working things on our side of the metaphorical newsroom wall. This column by our international guru, Trudy Rubin, on how America’s election fiascos are influencing the rest of the world is just the latest example. You can also check out all of our endorsements in this handy guide. And while it wasn’t an endorsement, I was proud of our editorial sticking up for John Fetterman’s post-stroke performance in last month’s Senate debate, as others ridiculed him.

Will that debate decide whether or not Fetterman can beat Mehmet Oz in what is shaping up as the night’s most critical race, and maybe its closest? Let me repeat what I said earlier: I have no idea.

Today reminds me of the very first magazine article I ever wrote, when I worked on Long Island in the 1980s. It was about coping with that region’s horrific traffic, and it was inspired by an idea called “Zen driving.” Today, let’s try some Zen voting. Cross your legs and chant “ooomm” if necessary. Breathe deep. The results will come...when it’s time.

Question: Did you vote? — Via David Beard (@dabeard) on Twitter

Answer: Not yet as I write this on Tuesday morning, but I’ll be heading out to my polling place in Delaware County as soon as my editor hits the “send” button on this newsletter. As a fellow journalist, you are aware, David, there are a few folks at the higher level of our profession who don’t believe that people in the news business should vote, that it somehow taints our ability to write objectively. That’s utter baloney. A free press and the 1st Amendment are essential to democracy, but so is casting a ballot — and it’s bonkers to practice one but not the other. I think the public is better served by transparency — by journalists who not only vote but make public who they voted for. I recently re-registered as an independent — that’s how I like to roll, when possible. But as the GOP turns away from democracy, I’ll be voting for Democrats — including John Fetterman, because the guy who had a stroke is the only Senate candidate with any heart, and the opponent of dangerous extremist Doug Mastriano. I’m sure that surprises no one, but it belongs on the record.

Since the start of the Phillies’ amazing “Red October” run, I’ve been tracking the parallel surge in disgusting political attack ads run on those playoff games by Citizens for Sanity, the well-funded “dark money” PAC tied to Team Trump members like xenophobia guru Stephen Miller. The group’s ads were initially noteworthy for their violent melodrama around crime and immigration, but as Election Day neared there was a sudden pivot to a new claim: President Biden hasn’t addressed these problems because he’s spending billions to support Ukraine, which has brought the planet to the brink of World War III. Citizens for Sanity even produced a spot that was an update on LBJ’s famed 1964 “Daisy” ad, in which a little girl gives way to a mushroom cloud. At this point, you don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to wonder where Citizens for Sanity is really getting its money from, and why its agenda of ending U.S. aid for Ukraine is identical to Vladimir Putin’s.

As noted in an earlier item, the new line from the Kremlin is no longer to deny its meddling in American elections but to boast about it. I think that this truth serves Putin’s purpose right now, to finish off the demoralization of U.S. voters that started with the chaos of 2016. There’s a large pool of evidence that the Russian effort to help Trump win that election — even if it mostly wasn’t coordinated with an easily duped campaign team back at Trump Tower — was extensive, and that such efforts have continued through the use of internet trolls and bots and disinformation that is widely shared on social media. Indeed, the new lawlessness of Elon Musk’s Twitter is a wet dream for Putin’s Internet Research Agency. To be clear, America’s democratic downfall has been mostly our own work, but I don’t think the U.S. has truly come to terms with how much Putin has piled on — and made matters even worse. And I fear that historians in 2122 — if historians are still legal then — will be asking how our society allowed this to happen.