Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve been seeing some particularly stupid articles arguing electors have the duty to vote their conscience, not their pledge.

 Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution provides that each state shall appoint electors.  How and who gets appointed elector is up to the legislatures of the states.  The electors meet in their respective states and cast their votes for President which are transmitted to the Senate to be counted.  This is a hold-over from the days when travel by foot or horse made national elections a logistical nightmare, but it’s still the law.

 Minnesota Statutes 208.03 provides that presidential electors shall be nominated by the major political parties at their convention and Minn. Stat. 208.04 says a vote for a presidential candidate cast in the general election is treated as a vote for the electors of that party.  When a Minnesota voter casts a ballot for Hillary, she’s actually voting for the electors appointed by the DFL Party.

 In 2015, Minnesota adopted the Uniform Faithful Presidential Electors Act to bring our law into closer conformity with the majority of states.  Under Minn. Stat. 208.43, electors sign a pledge:

 “If selected for the position of elector, I agree to serve and to mark my ballots for president and vice president for the nominees for those offices of the party that nominated me.”

 There is no penalty for refusing to honor the pledge.  There should be.

Minnesotans voted Hillary because, after listening to their speeches, scrutinizing their records and analyzing their promises, they thought Hillary would make a better president.  The law that equates a vote for Hillary as a vote for Pledged Electors does not authorize the electors to substitute their judgment for mine and instead vote for Bernie.  The electors are merely the messenger transmitting my decision to Washington.  We decide on the message.

 It must be that way.  I have no way to evaluate Muhammad Abdurrahman’s judgment and beliefs.  I never heard of him until he broke his pledge.  It would be insane for me to hand him carte blanche to vote for anybody he liked – that would defeat the whole purpose of having a general election.  Although it might make the campaigns shorter.  Under that system, you’d never get to see the candidates, never get to hear them.  You’d just vote “DFL” or “GOP” and the apparatchiks appointed by the big-shots in the smoke-filled rooms would pick whoever The Bosses decide to install as President – Hillary, then Jeb, then Chelsea, then one of George W’s girls . . . . 

 Joe Doakes.

Punch:   Harry Reid on Mitt Romney talking with Trump about serving in the Administration:

“This is a man who came out big-time against Trump. Oh, the things he said about Trump. Well, that’s great, that’s wonderful,” Reid said. “Either he wasn’t telling the truth, or he’s a person with no character. After having said that, to go and do homage to this guy he said awful things about, I don’t think that shows much character.”

“Mitt Romney is somebody I had respect for,” Reid said, in a somewhat dubious assertion. “I have none anymore.”

Counterpunch:  Romney’s response, with emphasis added to wallow in the pure gloriousness of it all:

“I was indeed very critical of Mr. Trump during his campaign. But now he has been elected president and accordingly, if I could have helped shape foreign policy to protect the country I love, I would have been more than willing to do so,” Romney said through a spokesperson. “As for Mr. Reid, I lost respect for him when he repeatedly lied about my taxes and later admitted to it cheerily. Good riddance, Mr. Reid. The Senate will be better served without you in it.”

I always like Mitt.  I like him more now.

To Democrats, doing what politicians do – engage in rhetoric – is business as usual.  Until it’s a Republican, when suddenly it’s “hypocrisy”.

Good riddance, Reid.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota has early voting.  People were coming to the office two months before election, to cast absentee ballots.  That was before most of the major revelations about Hillary.

 To what extent did early voting artificially inflate Hillary’s support?  Had those voters been required to vote on election day – knowing the full story about her – would some have changed their votes?

 Joe Doakes

The answer, I suspect?  To borrow a phrase, “bigly”.

Kevin Williamson on the return of at least some old fashioned values among Democrats after the election of Donald Trump who, let’s forget, had more in common with Bernie Sanders than any other candidate on the ballot:

The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica. As Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out, the same people who until ten minutes ago denounced federalism — which they mischaracterize as the doctrine of “states’ rights” — as an instrument for the suppression of African Americans are now embracing secession, which, in the American context at least, has a little bit of its own racial baggage.

Read the whole thing, naturally.

Last year, exactly one pundit predicted Donald Trump would be in the race as of Christmas, to say nothing of winning the primaries and (as he predicted in May) the election itself.

It was Scott Adams, cartoonist behind Dilbert.

That Scott Adams.

Last year, when many observers were saying Trump was a stupid, under-informed clown, I was saying he was a Master Persuader. Pundits said he ignored facts because he didn’t know them or because he was a liar. I said he ignored facts because facts are useless for persuasion. Trump could learn lots of facts if he wanted to do so. But he knew it was a waste of time. These are two totally different views of reality. And yet they did not conflict. Clinton supporters still see the stupid, under-informed clown and I still see the Master Persuader. We live in totally different movies and yet we can still interact with each other, still eat and drink, still procreate when necessary.

The whole thing is worth a read.

I’ll be the first to admit – I didn’t see last night coming.

When I went on the air, I knew that Trump had to win North Carolina, Florida and Ohio to have a shot – even a long shot at the presidency.

All three fell; North Carolina fairly quickly, Florida with a bit of suspense, and Ohio in a complete rout.

From there, as Brad Carlson and I broadcast from the Radisson Blue and the GOP Victory Party, we puttered around with various scenarios, watching the numbers creep up, wondering if it’d come down to Nevada…

…until events bypassed us all.  When Wisconsin went Trump, I knew my math was out the window; when Michigan, New Hampshire, and – incredibly, finally, Pennsylvania – dropped in the bucket, I felt…

…like someone had dropped LSD into the cucumber water in the press pit.  I was, for one of very few times in my talk radio career, reduced to jabbering nonsense on the air.

We recovered, of course; to the best of my knowledge, we predicted the flip in the Minnesota Senate before the rest of the Twin Cities media, yet again; only a math mistake on my part precluded Brad and me from being first on the ground with an official prediction.

Local highlights:  The GOP broke their curse inside the metro:  Roz Peterson crushed her challenger; Randy Jessup and Dario Anselmo flipped solid first and second tier suburban seats; Paul Anderson flipped Terri Bonoff’s old seat.   Tim Walz is facing a recount against Jim Hagedorn; Obamacare cost him bad, but I have a hunch his ill-advised and arrogant photo with the Action Moms didn’t help much.

Nancy Laroche is now on the Crystal City Council!

And  – Congressman Lewis.  I love that.   We finally found a campaign where cynical lies aimed at the lowest, basest common denominator (worst than the stereotype Trump voter, even!) lost.  It restored my faith in Minnesota voters.

Downsides:  Dave Hann, one of the most decent people in politics, is out.  And Stewart Mills.  That hurt.

But what about Trump?  Kevin Williamson of National Review – an out-front non-fan of Trump (vide his coverage of Trump’s kickoff entitied “Witless Ape Ascends Escalator“, to telegraph the punch just a little) – has some advice, and I like it a lot:

The first and most important thing to do is to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that Trump sticks by the promise he made — his record on keeping his word is not very good — on his list of Supreme Court nominees under consideration. If a Trump presidency means ensuring a generation of decent constitutional jurisprudence on the First and Second Amendments, then that will be worth a great deal in the way of tradeoffs. What tradeoffs? Conservatives should meet Trump on his own ground on the question of immigration, especially illegal immigration. His proposals on the question have been fantastical — making Mexico pay for a wall and all that — but his insistence that this be addressed rather than being kept eternally on the national back burner is appropriate. There are reasonable steps on immigration that can be taken, an enforcement-first approach that secures the borders (and the airports and the visa system) and focuses on workplace enforcement before moving on to broader reform questions, such as replacing the reunification-oriented chain-immigration system with one based on economic criteria.

The whole thing is, as always with Williamson, worth a read.

Heh.

On the one hand, 4-8 years of Clinton will do for women what 8 years of Obama did for race relations.

On the other, we’ve got four more glorious years of non-stop blog and talk show fodder.

UPDATE:  Clearly, I wrote this on Sunday, expecting a Hillary win.

I neglected to delete it.

What the heck.

You just know Team Clinton – the finest collection of political skullduggerers, character assassins and anger merchants money can buy – didn’t burn through all their their oppo-research two weeks ago.  You just know they saved something for today, the last news dump before election day.

Let’s take bets.  What is Team Clinton going to dump today?

Just remember – Nate Silver’s 538 statistics blog is infallible.  Bet your mortgage payments on their statistically-modeled predictions.

Because human nature never defies numbers.  It’s settled science.

Minnesota high school students choose Trump over Clinton:

More than 77,000 students from 213 high schools have taken part in the election so far, and the first round of results came in Tuesday morning.

The Republican ticket with Donald Trump and Mike Pence narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine 35 to 33 percent. The Trump/Pence ticket received 26,930 votes and the Clinton/Kaine ticket received 25,333 votes.

When I was in high school, I think Jimmy Carter won by a 2:1 margin over Ronald Reagan.  So this is a surprise, to say the least.