Pitmaster Trump's House Of BBQ

As David Roberts reminds us, limiting Earth to just two degrees of global average temperature gain was going to take a Herculean effort on the part of any administration that followed President Obama's.  Now that we know it will be a Trump administration, any hope of limiting catastrophic climate-based damage to merely "immorally awful"has gone up in smoke.

The truth is, hitting the 2-degree target (much less 1.5 degrees) was always a long shot. It would require all the world’s countries to effectively turn on a dime and send their emissions plunging at never-before-seen rates. 

It was implausible, but at least there was a story to tell. That story began with strong US leadership, which brought China to the table, which in turn cleared the way for Paris. The election of Hillary Clinton would have signaled to the world a determination to meet or exceed the targets the US promised in Paris, along with four years of efforts to create bilateral or multilateral partnerships that pushed progress faster. 

With steady leadership, the US and China would exceed their short-term goals. Other countries would have their willpower fortified and steadily ratchet up their commitments. All this coordinated action would result in a wave of clean energy innovation, which would push prices down lower, which would accelerate the transition. 

The promise of US leadership was never about tons of US emissions; they are only 15 percent of the world’s total. (Though, as Chris Mooney notes, pledged US reductions accounted for about 20 percent of total reductions pledged in Paris.) It was about the US acting as a catalyst that sparked a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle of escalating ambition, eventually building up the momentum necessary for a chance at 2 degrees. 

That story is gone now. Dead. The US will not provide leadership — it will be an active, and very powerful, impediment. Under unified Republican leadership, progress on lowering emissions in the US will halt and reverse and US participation in international efforts to combat climate change will cease. (I will have more to say on the scope of the coming Republican policy disaster in another post.)

There is a small sliver of hope as far as fostering climate technology innovation: blue states.

Yes, there will still be plenty of action to cheer. California and other West Coast states will continue to move forward, as will New York and a few more. Cost reductions in clean energy will continue, though they will likely slow down. The broad, tidal forces pushing for decarbonization will continue. But speed is of the essence, and the best chance for speed is now gone. 

For all its troubles, the US is an indispensable leader of the free world. Its official posture is now going to be hostile to climate action. 

Under those circumstances, the story about the world unifying to take bold, dramatic action on climate change, beyond what was pledged in Paris, has gone from unlikely to utter fantasy. The best climate activists can hope for is that Trump loses in 2020 in a giant Democratic wave that involves redoubled commitment to climate action.

And that's looking like an even longer shot than limiting the carnage to just two degrees worth of damage.

It's Payback Time!

Understand that the regular order of business in the Trump administration is going to be revenge against slights both real and imagined, no matter how petty.  This is a man that has a long history of holding personal grudges and using the levers of power to satisfy those grudges, and now he's going to be President of the United States of America.

But first things first: the Orangenacht for the Never Trump movement.  He cannot wait to get out the long knives on that action and his team is letting everyone know that if you backed the wrong side, there's going to be a price.

Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich is being considered for Secretary of State or Health and Human Services secretary, Politico reports. And he wants to make it absolutely clear that a Trump administration will not be bowing to the forces of reason. 

On Fox News Wednesday, the former speaker of the House told Sean Hannity, “Their technique will be to say ‘Oh, be reasonable. Don’t push too hard. Don’t force the issue. Find a compromise with Democrats,” Gingrich said. “Maybe he shouldn’t name one of the justices who are conservative who’s on his list. Maybe he should find a nice moderate acceptable to the Democrats. Down that road is a disaster. And so we have to be aware that the danger is not that they’re going to actively fight. The danger is that they’re going to opt for honeyed words of subversion that undermines the entire movement to make America great again.” 

Perhaps Democrats are going to have a few problems working with a Trump administration, just saying.

Speaking of honeyed words, Gingrich also had a message for #NeverTrump Republicans who opposed the President-elect (and who, to be fair, have been pretty quiet post election). 

“The little, whiny, sniveling negative cowards who were ‘Never Trumpers’ are beneath our paying attention to them. Let them drift off into the ashbin of history while we go ahead and work with Donald Trump and with the House and Senate Republicans to create a dramatically new future.”

Yep.  Democrats are definitely going to be punished.  Never doubt for a moment that the Trump administration will gleefully work to dismantle the civil rights era in every aspect.

But the Never Trump GOP is getting tossed in the trash first.  And the message is going to be pretty clear that Trump plans to assemble his Legion of Doom cabinet without interference from Republicans who suddenly might want to "keep him in check".

So if you're counting on Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, etc to move to block Trump, that's not going to happen.  They'll fold just like they have done in the past, and with Trump calling the shots, they'll fall in line in short order.

StupidiNews!

• As demonstrations in cities across the country against President-elect Trump took place for a second day, police in Portland used pepper spray to break up what they termed a "riot".
• A federal judge in Michigan has ordered state and city officials to deliver bottled water to some residents in Flint as the city's water supply remains contaminated.
• Legendary songwriter, poet and artist Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82, his hits including "Hallelujah", "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "Anthem" have been covered for decades.
• Russian officials say the country did reach out diplomatically to both the Trump and Clinton teams during the campaign, the Trump camp says they are "unaware" of such meetings. 
• President-elect Trump's plans for the FCC could reverse net neutrality and set-top box decisions and could also strip current chairman Tom Wheeler of his position.

Last Call For Killing The DREAM

Greg Sargent notes that Donald Trump's first major plans in 2017 will almost certainly involve making good on GOP promises to dismantle President Obama's protections for those brought to the US as undocumented immigrants as children.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to cancel all of Obama’s executive actions right away as president. That includes a promise to scrap Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which grants work permits and temporary reprieve from deportation to the DREAMers. Obama’s executive deportation relief has been widely denounced by Republicans for years, and Trump’s immigration plan vows to “immediately terminate” DACA, describing it as an “illegal amnesty.” 

It will be fully within Trump’s power to act on this promise on Day One of his presidency, immigration lawyer David Leopold tells me. Because DACA was granted by executive action, it is subject to revocation at the discretion of the president — or any of his successors. (Obama’s effort to expand this protection to other classes was halted by the courts, but DACA remains in force.) If Trump cancels DACA on Day One, Leopold says, it would revoke the work permits of its beneficiaries in short order and leave them subject to deportation. 

“Many of these people are young, starting off, and heavily invested in participating openly in the American system,” Leopold says. 

This could have a disruptive impact on hundreds of thousands of people, as well as their families and communities — whether or not they end up getting deported later. After vowing mass deportations throughout the primaries, Trump modified this plan during the general election, promising to deport only the criminals first. But Trump’s modified plan would create no meaningful path to long-term legal status and would leaveundocumented immigrants targets for deportation at some unspecified later date. Revoking protection for the DREAMers would raise the prospect of them getting deported later and effectively drive them underground in the short term. 

Immigration advocates are already organizing to fight Trump, should he make good on this and other promises. “There’s no way these young people are going to walk quietly back into the shadows,” Leopold says.

So here's the question: does the GOP actually want to do this?  Will the Trumpies give them the choice not to?

The question is whether other Republicans will want this story to unfold. Congressional Republicans have voted to defund DACA in the past. But they did so secure in the knowledge that they could rail angrily at Obama’s lawless amnesty without facing the political consequences of actually ending it, because they knew President Obama would never allow that to happen. 

But now President Trump can end DACA himself with the stroke of a pen, and produce all of those consequences right away. If Trump does not go through with this, he may be castigated by immigration hardliners for breaking a promise on an issue that appears to have been central to his appeal to the “forgotten men and women” who elected him and make up Donald Trump’s America. If he does go through with it, we will be provided with an early and vivid illustration of what the xenophobic promises Trump made to His America actually mean in the real world.

You should absolutely expect President Trump to start moving to round up and start mass deportations, starting with reversing DACA.  We've already got an America where DREAMers are terrified and white Trump voters are openly taunting them, saying they'll be deported.

Of course this is going to happen.  And it's just the start of the brutal Trump regime.

The Missing White Voter Showed Up?

And they were furious.  The kind of voter that sat out with Bush, McCain and Romney showed up for Donald Trump in the same way Barack Obama motivated young voters of color to show up eight years ago.  Real Clear Politics pundit Sean Trende has been predicting this for years.

This will probably sound a little odd if you were watching TV on election night 2012. Romney won 59% of the white vote in exit polls, better than President Bush’s 58% in 2004. Unfortunately for Romney, the white share of the electorate declined from 79.2% to 73.7 % over the same period. The result: Obama won by an even bigger margin than Bush did thanks to blowout margins with minorities.

But conservative commentators are convincing themselves they can find a few million more whites tucked between the couch cushions–at least enough for one more election. Two columnists have been particularly influential in this regard. Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has argued that census data shows about 5 million mostly poor and rural white voters were “projected” to vote in 2012 based on population growth and past turnout but didn’t show up to the polls. Byron York, a columnist at the Washington Examiner, published a related piece noting that Romney would have lost even if he had racked up a majority of Latino voters.

“Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day,” York wrote in May. “If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.”

The Missing White Voter sure as hell showed up in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Iowa.  But as Trende himself points out today, in no state did these voters supposedly show up more than in Ohio.

In 2013, after all the votes had been counted, I was able to perform a more thorough analysis. It became apparent to me that these voters were blue-collar, rural and lived in areas with strong showings for Ross Perot. This reinforced my view that if Republicans softened their economic libertarianism and nominated the right candidate, this bloc might turn out and help the party win with only modest improvements among nonwhites.

This provoked great controversy. To this day I am a bit perplexed, as I was effectively saying to Democrats, “You were correct, the GOP has to make some changes to its approach in order to win.” Part of the backlash was plainly inspired by people who did not read the article. More importantly, my observation was expressly limited to the idea that missing whites could help the GOP win. People interpreted this as advocating for a “whites-only” GOP, which I expressly disclaimed, both in that article and in a subsequent piece.

It is far too early to say for certain, but what happened Tuesday certainly looks consistent with the missing-whites thesis. First, there’s very little doubt that Trump’s vote share soared when compared to Mitt Romney’s in northern rural areas. But turnout seems to have been robust as well. We once again will have to wait until all the votes are counted to conduct a more robust analysis, but consider Ohio once again:


For this iteration, the darkest red counties are ones where turnout was up or the same as 2012 levels, while lighter shades suggest turnout was down. As you can see, the Columbus and Cincinnati suburban counties – Delaware and Union, Clermont and Warren – were dark red. This is expected, given the population growth there. Notice, however, that the urban counties – Hamilton, Franklin, Cuyahoga, Stark, Summit, Lucas and Montgomery – are light. Turnout was down substantially there.

But look at the rest of the state, especially the southeast. There is a lot of red there, which is all the more surprising given population declines. It isn’t yet clear that whites there turned out in increased numbers, but they clearly avoided the decreases we saw in other areas of the state, and nationwide. Again, we need more data, but for now the best indications are that these voters were, in fact, inspired by a Republican candidate with more blue-collar appeal. Donald Trump did do better with nonwhites than Mitt Romney, which played a significant role in his victory. But there’s little doubt that a strong showing with these rural whites, who are disconnected from the global economy that increasingly defines urban and suburban environs, played a major role in his win.

That's a pretty solid explanation, and it's the Bernie Sanders/Michael Moore explanation for why Clinton lost this election: the Democrats abandoned the Working White Class Voter.

Except there's one little problem with that explanation.  It doesn't explain everything.

Here's what actually happened.

Voter suppression efforts by the GOP in NC, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, combined with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act three years ago by the Supreme Court, turned into the most successful "ground game" in Republican history.  Trende's argument is this:

1. Overall turnout was down, as evidenced by Clinton's numbers being down about 5 million from Obama's 2012 total.
2. Trump's numbers should have been just as bad and should also have been down about 5 million from Romney's 2012 total,
3. But they weren't because White Working Class Voters showed up and he won.

If that's the case, if that's a national trend where Clinton turnout was down in all states, then Clinton should have also lost states like Maine, New Hampshire, Nevada and Colorado.  She didn't.

But states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, states where GOP Voter ID laws and efforts to end early voting (PA doesn't have early voting) were in effect?  These are the key states Clinton lost.

Pennsylvania is the one state where Trende's theory does work because Clinton got more votes than Obama did in 2012, and by a lot in Philly and its suburbs.  But she got *crushed* in Appalachian counties and didn't get the votes in places like Eire and Scranton.  But Trende's theory doesn't hole water in Wisconsin or North Carolina or yeah, even Ohio.

And we know exactly why.  Yes, overall turnout was down.  But Clinton's turnout was down more, because Republicans made it harder to people to vote especially in these key states, and that's why Donald Trump won.  Please remember that if was really the issue with economics, then Trump would have easily won voters making under $50,000 a year.

He lost voters making under $30K by 12 points, and those making $30-$50K by 11 points and split the rest with Clinton.

The Missing White Voter is nonsense.  GOP voter suppression was the most successful screwing of the American voting system since Jim Crow.

Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

If you thought Kansas's economy was the laughing stock of the country, wait until Matt Bevin makes sure Kentucky is about to get the full Brownback.

Unhindered by a state Democratic Party reduced to rubble on election day, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin claimed a bold mandate from Kentucky voters Wednesday and vowed to overhaul state government in ways he couldn't during his first year in office.

Bevin's to-do list after Republicans seized control of the state House of Representatives for the first time since 1920 includes overhauling the state's tax code, making it illegal for companies to force employees to join a labor union, letting parents send their children to private schools with the help of public dollars and getting rid of the Common Core educational standards.

And late Tuesday night, Bevin said he expects the new Republican majority to pass laws reversing several court decisions that blocked some of his executive orders — including one that abolished and replaced the board of trustees at the University of Louisville.

"The people are already seizing this chance before them," Bevin said during an appearance on WHAS radio. "Over the next generation you will see Kentucky become a beacon to America for what it means to be open for business."

Kentucky has long resisted becoming a right-to-work state because of coal miner unions.  That's dead and gone, along with what's left of the the state's public school system, Bevin will raid the education budget for the same type of charter school scam John Kasich is running, currently tied up in Ohio's courts over blame and fraud accusations for losing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.

And tax reform?  That will be the big one.  And nothing can stop him now. Especially not "courageous" Democrats like these.

Democratic state Rep. Brent Yonts blamed the abrupt end of his 20-year state House career on a trend in his western Kentucky district to vote straight Republican, spurred by the unpopularity of Hillary Clinton atop the Democrats' ticket.

"We had the worst presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket we've ever had," Yonts added. "The believability factor was what killed her and killed us."

The Brownback Plan is coming.  And it will end this state's economy just as surely as Kansas is on the edge of transferring billions in corporate tax liability to the backs of citizens.

StupidiNews!

• Hillary Clinton delivered her concession speech to President-elect Donald Trump and America yesterday morning in NYC, beginning with the simple words "I'm sorry".
• Thousands of anti-Trump protesters in dozens of cities took to the streets across the country to demonstrate against the President-elect and his stated policies.
• President Obama will meet with President-elect Trump at the White House today to begin a "smooth transition of power" in the way Obama says he was grateful for eight years ago.
• Markets reacted in mixed fashion to Trump's win yesterday as the Dow rose to a record high, but global bond markets lost a third of a trillion dollars in value.
• Trump's expected science and space policies will most likely mean major cuts to NASA's Earth science and climate change monitoring programs.

Last Call For Obamacare

Things are going to move quickly in the new year with our new Republican masters.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled the Senate would move swiftly to repeal Obamacare now that the GOP Congress will have a Republican president next year.

"It's pretty high on our agenda as you know," the Kentucky Republican said on Wednesday. "I would be shocked if we didn't move forward and keep our commitment to the American people."

McConnell would not explicitly commit to using budget reconciliation to repeal the healthcare law, though it's the likely path for Republicans to repeal the law, as they have only a narrow Senate majority next year.

Hope nobody had pre-existing conditions or has expanded Medicaid coverage, because that's going away pretty soon.   Gonna be fun to see a whole lot of people who voted for Trump lose their health insurance and please, please notice that McConnel didn't mention any plans of "replacement".  That's not going to happen with this administration.

Well I take it back, tens of millions will lose health coverage and have it replaced by a bottle of Aleve and a box of bandages, medical bankruptcy, and foregoing care.

Stay tuned, middle America.  You voted for it.

Dispatches From Bevinstan

As I said last night, the KY Democrats are now gone, wiped out in the General Assembly.  There is nothing standing between Bevin and everything he wants, and with a Trump administration, well, it's going to get bad here starting fast.  And he wants everyone to know that he his enemies are the first to end up under the bus.

On the defeat of House Speaker Greg Stumbo:

"The best news that came out of any individual district, for sure ... 38 years I believe Greg has been here, a career politician. He hasn't given a rip about the people in his district for a long time. He hasn't even lived there for better than a decade ... I say, 'Good riddance.' I mean he will not be missed one bit. Kentucky will be better for his absence." (From WVHU Radio.)

On the Environmental Protection Agency:

"Donald Trump has voiced his support for the coal industry ... Nothing would make me happier than to see his administration say, 'You know what? We're going to gut the EPA.' The EPA is not needed at the federal level ... There's not one state in America that wants dirty water and dirty air for its people. Not one. We've got the ability to implement, we're already the ones that enforce all the action at the state level. Let us continue to do what we are doing and what we can do well without the interference, without the un-elected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., passing down edicts ..." (From WVHU Radio.) 

On Obamacare:

"Obamacare is a disaster. It has been from the time it was rammed down our throats by Democrats –100 percent of the people supporting it were Democrats. Well, guess what? The American people sent a powerful message last night. We have the presidency. We have the U.S. Senate. We have the U.S. Congress. We have states like ours and governors like myself that are saying enough of this. We're rejecting it. We want it gone. It's going to be gone." (From WVLC Radio.)

On Kentucky's direction:

"We will start to go in a different direction where able-bodied working age men and women are going to be expected to go to work. They're not going to get things for nothing in the state of Kentucky. Where deadbeat dads are not going to be welcome in this state – they are going to be held to account to take care of their children. Where people are going to (have) incentive to be, you know, traditional families with a mother and a father raising their children. Where we're going to start to reward the types of things that we know the cornerstone of a good, civilized society and a successful society are based on. We're going to return to the true Judeo-Christian principles that this nation was founded on. We're not going to be apologetic for the values that made this state and this nation great." (From WVLC Radio.)

I now live in a Christian theocratic state, dedicated to getting rid of people like myself, in a Christian theocratic country, dedicated to getting rid of people like myself.

Gonna be good times.

Welcome to Bevinstan.

So What The Hell Happened?

Well, to keep it simple, a whole lot of Americans showed up at the polls yesterday and voted, and it was very much "Dewey Defeats Truman" as all the pollsters got 2016 as wrong as Kentucky pollsters got 2015's rise of Matt Bevin wrong.

All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.

No one predicted a night like this — that Donald J. Trump would pull off a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and win the presidency.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.

Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.

It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.

Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection early Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency.

And they were wrong. The exit polls tell the tale.  Despite the percentage of white voters dropping to 70% of the electorate, below 2012's 72%, white voters pulled the lever for Trump by big margins.



Clinton's purported lead among college-educated whites evaporated 45-49% in favor of Trump, and among white voters without a degree, Clinton was destroyed 28-67%.  She actually did have a slight lead among white women with degrees, 51-45%, but white men with degrees voted for Trump by a whopping 15 points, 39-54% in favor of The Donald.

But here's the other knife that Clinton didn't see coming:



Clinton *lost* white Millennials by five points, and Gen Xers by 18.  Overall, Clinton did win Millennials 55-37%, but in 2012, Obama won them 67-30%.

Here's the thing: Clinton will end up winning the popular vote by millions, Trump might not actually get even to McCain's 60 million.  But the electoral college means that Clinton ran up the score in states like California, Texas, Georgia and New York when she needed to run it up in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

Most of all where Dems got "Nadered" in Florida in 2000, the third party vote for Johnson and Stein in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin was higher than Trump's margin of victory in any of those states.

That was the ball game.

Now comes the consequences.

StupidiNews!

• With a stunning victory and record turnout that shattered Clinton's Midwest "firewall" states, Donald J. Trump is now President-Elect of the United States of America.
• Republicans will also keep control of the US Senate as Democrats came up short but Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth did win her race unseating Republican Mark Kirk.
• California became the largest state to legalize recreational use of marijuana along with Massachusetts, at least one-fifth of Americans now live in states where pot is legal.
• Dow futures were down as much as 1000 points before reality set in early Wednesday as world markets were roiled by the Trump upset.
• President-elect Trump's victory leaves the state of US cybersecurity in doubt other than promising an immediate review of America's internet structure.

Election Day Open Thread

Polls close here in Kentucky starting at 6 PM and in the Central time zone half of the state at 7 PM, so we'll place all state calls here starting then.

I'll update as we go.

[9 PM update]  Florida is razor close, as is Ohio and NC.  Still no surprises.  In the Senate races, Tammy Duckworth wins in IL, but Evan F'ckin Bayh was smoked in Indiana.

Locally, Kentucky Democrats have been annihilated.  This state is now under one-party GOP rule until further notice. KY GOP needed to pick up 4 seats, they might end up with a dozen plus.  Matt Bevin will be able to pass anything he wants come 2017, and then this state will feel the pain.  Kansas budget plus an NC bathroom bill plus the closing of the state's last abortion provider?  A very real possibility.

[10 PM update] Ohio officially called for Trump, Virginia called for Clinton.  Iowa, Nevada, and Colorado too close to call.  Turnout massive but that's throwing off all the state call models.

[11 PM update] NC and Florida called for Trump.  CO called for Clinton. This is where things start getting dicey.  MI, WI, PA, NH, GA still too close to call.  Clinton needs MI, WI, NV and PA now.  Any one of those go to Trump, it's all but over.

[12 AM update] Georgia and Iowa go to Trump.  FOX News has called Wisconsin for Trump, but others have not. PA, NH, MI, AZ, NV still not called yet.  Without Wisconsin...I don't think she can win.

[1 AM update]  Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all but called for Trump the way NC and Florida were earlier tonight.   It's just about over barring some serious last-minute urban voting.

[1:45 final update] And AP calls PA for Trump. I was wrong like everyone.

It's over barring a miracle involving Clinton winning everything else.   Clinton will probably win the popular vote.

But here there be dragons.

Tomorrow, we fight them.

A Good Day For Nutjobs

No matter who wins, the mouth-breathing doomsday prepper crowd is getting ready for that American Armageddon starting tomorrow, and spending an awful lot of money on their paranoia to boot.  Hey, they're good for the economy, right?

As Lucas Cameron sees it, there’s no way this election can end well. “Trump will win the popular vote by a landslide, and then the Electoral College will give it to Clinton,” he told me as his wife, Nikki, drove us through the rolling mountains of northeast Tennessee. Their home-schooled 12-year-old son, Jonathon, sat in the back, sipping on a McDonald’s drink, placidly gazing out the window as his father laid out some fairly terrifying scenarios. “By spring, we’ll be in a proxy war with Russia and going at it hard with Iran,” Lucas said. Things don’t look much better if Trump, his preferred candidate, wins. “If Trump is elected, Black Lives Matters goes crazy,” he says. “And Obama won’t let him take office. He’ll declare martial law so he can stay another four years.” If he does, and Trump takes office, “a recession is guaranteed.” 

But luckily, Lucas and Nikki have been preparing for years—for nuclear war, for social unrest, for economic meltdown, and all kind of biblically prophesied turmoil. A completely insane election is just one more possibility for how it all ends, and people like them—so-called preppers, who were once known as survivalists—are ready. The Camerons have bought a plot of a land in a remote stretch of Tennessee, which I wasn’t allowed to see for fear of compromising the secrecy of its location. They are almost done building a tiny house—144 square feet, to be exact—which they’ll put on the property and plant creeping vines and tall bushes to hide it from prying (government) eyes. It’ll have solar panels on its roof and there will be wind turbines on the property, which means they won’t need to rely on the electric grid. And, of course, they’ve stocked up on weapons and ammunition.

He and Nikki run a business, Off Grid Contracting, to help others prepare for any modernity-ending eventuality, and what they’ve found is that the 2016 election has been a massive boost. “I’ve just never seen as many people prepping as there are now,” Lucas said. His friend Kevin O’Brien, a local realtor who specializes in helping people find plots of land to go off-grid, says, “My phone has been ringing off the hook.” I asked them to show me, using their forearms to mimic the slope of a graph, how demand has changed. Instead, both men imitated a rocket ship taking off. 

“People are getting ready,” Kevin said. “The can has been kicked down the road so many times. It’s a mathematical probability that the dollar will collapse.” 

While the rest of the country expects—or at least hopes—the election will put a merciful end to the chaos of campaign season, the Camerons are among the many Americans who think it will only get worse. The end of the campaign, many in this community believe, is only the beginning: The really bad stuff will begin the day after the election. “I’ll be honest with ya, I think some things are going to go down,” Lucas told me. 

“Nobody takes Obama seriously,” he said, “but the two people who are running for office—a lot of people are scared that he’ll hit the nuclear button without even taking a breath, and that she’s so wicked that I won’t be surprised if she opens the floodgates of ISIS to come in and kill all Americans.” Though most of his clients, like him, support Trump, he says, “Most all of them expect there will be riots in either case.”

In a way these clowns are proof of the oldest of adages about fools, money and parting.  On the other hand, how much paranoia and fear have these folks been fed to make them this way, and to rope their families, businesses and entire lives into this movement?

On the gripping hand, these guys are mostly Trump supporting "sovereign citizen" Bundy Ranch militia-types anyway, so if anything I'd be keeping a careful law enforcement eye on them.  They fit the profile, as the saying goes.

StupidiNews, Election Day Edition!

• It's Election Day.  Go vote.