Election Day Minus One

The polls open at midnight tonight - at least in the three first-in-the-nation mountain hamlets of my beloved New Hampshire, unless they've had two months of early voting like everywhere else and six of the total electorate of seven have already written in "Beto O'Rourke".

As I said a few months back, there's never been a better time to be in the plywood business - especially when the election race transitions to the election brace. The New York Times:

Boarded-Up Windows and Increased Security: Retailers Brace for the Election

The San Francisco Chronicle:

Bay Area Cities, Restaurants Boarding Up — Bracing for Potential Election-Night Unrest

Forbes:

City Business Across U.S. Brace For Election Day Unrest, Board Up Storefronts

Just another election day in a two-and-a-third-century long-settled republic. Manhattan celebrities (some of whom you might actually have heard of) have ordered up private armed guards for their luxury apartment houses - because, since they started calling for "defunding the police", getting someone to pick up at 9-1-l seems to be taking a little longer than it did back in the spring. I suppose it's conceivable that a few of these celebs and CEOs are so woke they believe their own bullsh*t and genuinely expect mobs of Trump voters to come rampaging through midtown Manhattan and start trashing Chanel and Dior. According to the tireless lads at The Hill, what Dan Rather used to call "the shadowy right-wing militias" are back:

Study warns five states at high risk for election-related armed violence by militia groups

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Oh, my! After six months of looting and burning by perps who get their bail paid by Biden staffers and Hollywood celebs, OJ is now warning that the real killer may show up on Tuesday night.

There may be three or four owners of upscale emporia worried that the right-wing haters will show up in their ladies' wear department before #BLM has finished cleaning it out. But most of these guys surely know all too well exactly who'll be coming for them:

#ShutDownDC is organizing groups of protesters to target Republican officials and government buildings during a series of planned election-week demonstrations.

Gee, it's almost like they're expecting to lose. From The Des Moines Register:

Iowa Poll: Donald Trump takes over lead in Iowa as Joe Biden fades

He's faded to seven points behind - in what's regarded as the gold standard of Hawkeye polls.

Ah, but did the Trump surge come too late? Over ninety-one million Americans have already returned their ballots - that's over two-thirds of the 2016 total. But are the right people voting?

Republicans in Florida's most populous county, Miami-Dade, are turning out to vote at a somewhat higher percentage than Democrats -- causing uneasiness among some Democratic operatives.

"Uneasiness": Hmmm... By "somewhat higher" they mean 63 per cent GOP turnout vs 56 per cent Dem.

Last time round, it was Hillary's underperforming in Miami-Dade that, round about 9.23pm Eastern, gave me the first heads-up Trump was going to win Florida. This time round, Biden is underperforming Hillary.

~It's a similar story in the Latino precincts of the Lone Star State, where overall the early vote outnumbers the 2016 total. The Kamala-Biden campaign has canceled its Texas bus tour because the bus and its stops attract, like almost all Joe's events, more Trump supporters than Biden supporters. Even worse, many of these Trumpers arrive not in hybrids or second-hand Toyota Corollas but in some strange menacing form of transportation with the obviously intimidating #MeToo-type name of "pick-up truck".

America's three bestselling vehicles are pick-ups. But fortunately, after four years at journalism school, their owners are entirely eliminated from your social circle.

Joe Biden is waging a Potemkin campaign backed by a Potemkin press and Potemkin polls. They're going to need an exponentially greater level of ballot-box malarkey to drag that across the finish line.

~The death of Sean Connery prompted several comments from Steyn Clubbers yesterday, including this one from Diane M Calabrese:

The comments others have made about Sean Connery (far and away the best Bond, even though I love Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan in other roles, though George Sanders was the best Saint) [hint] at something bigger. Connery was unabashedly masculine. When men man up they lead the way. They model courage. They say there is a way out.

That is very true. The only actor consciously to play Bond as a "new man" - Timothy Dalton - nearly killed the franchise. Ian Fleming's 007 has a necessary cruel streak (see the last line of the first novel), and that's what Bond's creator liked about Connery.

One reason for the trouble we're in is the lack of "masculine" men - which doesn't mean sitting in your man-cave watching woke corporate sports. A lot of my bestselling After America is about how modern life has done its best to make manhood unviable, and as a result has raised two generations of men who aren't "unabashedly" anything. That's why, on the streets of Seattle and Portland, the heavy lifting is done by unhappy women (at least partly so because of the de-masculinized men) and the fuller-figured psychotrannnies. The social engineering since Connery filmed Dr No has had terrible consequences.