It's still what's going to happen

Ok. Here’s what I wrote on twitter (I know. FUCK!) the day of the Iowa caucuses. I’ve made a couple of annotations to what I tweeted then, which are indicated by square brackets. I’d love to check my calculation, but I did it when I was still living in Maine, and all I can find are emails I sent people with that 288,230,… number, in order to, you know, scream. About the horror.

Ok, it's all over but the shooting, so here's my [another!] marker. In 2016 I decided to commit to voting for a woman until one was elected president; I used a demographically accurate model of the male-female population split and considered how many people were over the age of 35. It turns out that if a man were to win the presidency in 2020, it would mean that he pulled off the 1-in 288,230,376,151,711,744 chance miracle of being the n-th male president elected in a row, assuming that men and women are equally likely to be elected. That's a pretty good proof that the opposite is true, of course. It means that if you walked out on the street in 2016 and picked the first man you saw over the age of 35, he apparently is a nearly two billion times favorite to become president when compared to the most experienced candidate ever, assuming she is a woman (and discounting some other candidates you could make the same case for – some people will argue G W B had an equally impressive resume, for instance).

So. I decided to vote only for women.

Now, of course, it is time to pay the piper. I was perfectly happy to vote for Kamala Harris. I'd be ok voting for Gillibrand. I'm pretty uninterested in voting for Klobuchar. Tulsi literally hangs out with members of the literal Syrian nazi party, so I will not vote for her. Williamson is a gag candidate [she is a gag person; it is not a funny gag].

By process of elimination we arrive at Elizabeth Warren. I do not think she can win a general election, and I do not think she has made very good decisions in the last four years – she has been dedicated to trying to peel off voters from Sanders's cult of personality. That is a waste of time, and it builds this constraint into her campaign that she keeps banging into and rebounding from. It has forced her to pretend that people earning $250k a year need college loan relief. It's fucked up her candidacy.

Ideologically, my preferred candidates are probably Inslee or Castro. I like Booker. I think O'Rourke actually made a compelling case by running on just one or two issues that should overwhelmingly concern Americans. I think a lot of candidates are fine; I think twitter has absolutely brain poisoned a lot of people – Biden is fine. He is not a messiah. You shouldn't look to politics for messiahs; you should look to it for someone who will arrest the country's slide into authoritarianism and white nationalism. But, if I have the courage of my convictions, I should stick to my guns. I will dither about whether I will vote for Elizabeth Warren in the KY primary, or write-in another woman; that race happens in late May, and if anyone's still pretending it matters, it's an 80-year-old blowhard with a heart made out of dehydrated and partially reconstituted dolphin vaginas. He cannot win in a general election; he probably won't lose as badly as McGovern because of increasing national polarization. But I find it unlikely Warren can win, either.

So, if I vote for any of the declared candidates I am sad to say that it is for someone who I do not think can win. She's made bad decisions since 2016. And the moment she started trying to shoehorn "#butshepersisted" into non-sequitir tweets, it was obvious she doesn't have the used car salesman skillset that the job needs.

She'd be a pretty good executive, all things being equal. I'll vote for her in November, and maybe for her in May. I do not think she can win in November.

I worked my ass off in 2016 for Clinton. I do not know that I have it in me to do the same in 2020 for anyone. Maybe it's your turn to make some fucking calls and knock on people's doors.

Oh, and Bernie is an egotistical shithead who's accomplished nothing in life except to promote himself. That's just as true today as it was in 2016. He's encouraged conspiracy theory bullshit and dealt a permanent wound to the only party remotely interested in fixing America.