Before the election pundits take over at about midnight, I was pleased to find two programmes that engaged my interest. The first of these was an examination of the work of D H Lawrence and whilst the programme was informative, it has to be said that Lawrence is not the easiest writer with whom to get to grips. His approach to sex and sexuality was graphically summed up by one contributor who noted that for Lawrence one could pursue sex without any spiritual dimension, the spiritual (meaning the mental) world without a sexual dimension but Lawrence was exploring how difficult it was to fulfil these two objectives simultaneously. Of the various bits of Lawrences’s work that I have read, I actually think that I enjoyed ‘Sons and Lovers’ the most This programme was followed by the next in the five-part series being the remake of Amadeus. This is a curious adaptation, and I think that I agree with a critic ho argued that it doesn’t do justice to the music as did the original film of Amadeus with which it is all too easy to make unfavourable comparisons. Being an election junky and having looked forward tremendously to the results of the mid-term elections being announced, I don’t know how long I can actually stay awake and for how much of the night as well. My inclination is to wait up for an hour until a clear trend has started to establish itself and then I will probably go to bed with BBC2 burbling along in the background in case I wake up for some especially interesting results. An attempt by Donald Trump to meddle in the election has resulted in he Supreme Court denying Trump an injunction to exclude up to 20,000 voters from he State of California’s electoral riles on the grounds that some of theme may be illegal immigrants. The Court decided 9:0 to deny Trump his injunction but it emerged in the Supreme Court hearing that the database used by the White House to justify their claims may have had an inaccuracy rate approaching 50% in places. But America is a very litigious place and I expect to see legal challenges spring up all over the place, particularly is the margin of victory in any particular race is quite small. At one stage, it did appear that Trump would have ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents stationed at practically every polling station and this is a non too subtle an attempt to bring pressure to bear upon would be Democratic voters. It could be that this force, often akin to a private army to do Trump’s personal bidding, are not as prominent as the day has unfolded but of course their actions will be recorded on masses of mobile phones and their presence may be a little more low key. About half of the American electorate may already have voted by post (the so called ‘mailed in’ ballots) but if past elections are any guide, we may see huge lines of people extending for hundreds of yards and if the closing times are rigidly enforced and not extended by an emergency Court order, then this may a source of conflict between would be voters and the election authorities in the various states.
I stayed up to watch the election results until the Texas Senate seat was won by the Democrats followed shortly by Ohio and I knew that at that point the Democrats had gained four seats and were unlikely to lose any. If anything, the pollsters get it wrong by underestimating the degree of support enjoyed by the Democrats is a result accurately described not so much a wave but more a tsunami. A summary of the night’s bloodbath is that there is no way to spin Trump’s ‘catastrophic night’ This has been a catastrophic night for the Republicans and there is no way you can spin the midterm results, a senior research fellow at the University College London has said. James Boys added that many analysts expected the Republicans to lose the House of Representatives and ‘perhaps narrowly cling on to the Senate. That has not happened. I think you have got to go right back to 1994, arguably, to see anything that is even slightly comparable,’ he said. Boys further said that the Democrats’ success is a ‘seismic shift’ in US politics, adding that Donald Trump must ‘assume full responsibility for what has occurred overnight’. Although the final results are not in as Alaska is still to declare, the Democrats have a lead of about ten in the Senate and approximately eighty in the House of Representatives. Donald Trump has not called any of the elections fraudulent but has actually declared that the Democrats have done a good job in their successes. Trump would have lost every ounce of credibility if he had attempted to claim that the results were the result of a massive fraud but to try and save face he is trying to say that if he had been a candidate then he would have won the election by a landslide (which is, of course, completely farcical but a measure of his narcissism) An interesting question now emerges as which party has the greatest problems in the immediate future. For Republican activists the choice is whether to disavow Trump completely or whether to keep faith with his legacy. One would have thought that the Democrats would have far few problems but they are not a united party and there is quite a tension between the ‘centrist’ members of the party and the more ‘Democratic Socialist’ wing of the party which is much more radical. One interesting fact to emerge from the election that the worlds’s richest man, Elon Musk, has spent $0.5 billion to attempt to influence the result in Texas and the return on his investment is zero. There is a powerful argument that spending so much money at a time when many Americans were extremely worried about the cost of living was counter-productive and made the Democrats argue that a billionaire was trying to ‘buy’ Texas strike home. In the late morning, I did go and do a normal shopping for what was a very light week and then came home to unpack the shopping and to cook myself a light lunch of a ham omelette before wallowing a little in the post election analysis. As an afterthought, I wondered why the result from Alaska was so much delayed but now I know. Key reasons for the delay in announcing the results from Alaska include the following. Alaska is huge and sparsely populated. Transporting physical ballots from remote communities off the road system takes days or weeks. In 131 of Alaska’s more than 400 precincts, election workers count ballots by hand and read the tallies over the phone to regional offices rather than using high-speed tabulators. State law allows absentee and mail-in ballots—including overseas ballots—to arrive up to 10 to 15 days after Election Day, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. At the time of writing, the ballot was about 75% counted and there was only a gap of 600 votes between the Democrat and the Republican but at this rate we might not know the final answer for days or even weeks.