Check it – I’ve finally settled on a specific project to work on long-term and it’s called Verin Mathwin, after the WoL character (for reasons, no spoilers). It’s equal parts industrial, glitch, drum n bass, and synthwave, so if any of that appeals to you feel free to start streaming the album embedded above. Get hype.
America trembles on the edge of a knife and thereby so does the world. The last four years have been a gigantic cluster-fuck wild psychedelic circus interesting time and the ramp up to the 2020 Presidential election is no different. Pundits are allowing their imaginations to run wild with possibilities, some with more credibility than others. How will the election play out? I present here seven scenarios that I feel are the likeliest outcomes from a final count of the votes.
Scenario 1: Extreme Trump Win (312-226 for Trump)
We’ll start with the scenario most likely to cause widespread panic – lead off with the hits, baby, it gets the crowd moving. In this scenario we see the popular vote in several key states swing wildly toward Trump at the last minute, allowing him to hold on to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan while avoiding losing Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. This scenario is possible, I guess, but really rather unlikely. Trump would have to have a wild swing of more than 8% in Wisconsin and Michigan while getting more than a 5% swing in Pennsylvania. If 2016 style polling errors combined with a huge last-minute break of undecideds toward Trump were to occur, then Pennsylvania perhaps might be in play. There are a couple of problems with this scenario, however: first, polling companies realized that not weighting their results by education was fundamentally stupid; second, there was something like 16% undecided in 2016 and that figure has dropped precipitously to 6% on average this cycle. There probably aren’t enough error+swing factors in Wisconsin and Michigan for Trump to hold them. Pennsylvania becomes the key here, then, but while it’s possible for Trump to hold Pennsylvania I doubt he will. On one hand, people’s minds are largely made up; on the other, Biden’s margin of victory has held steady between 5 and 6% since July. Trump would have to sharply narrow this gap and it would likely at that point involve the GOP “going in with their lawyers the night of” to try to legally force all votes to not be counted. Which is, of course, a possibility. So while this scenario is possible according to some poll-watchers, Scenario 2 is a much likelier look at a Trump win. Also note that this is the best Trump is likely to see; I’ve seen people out there spinning wild scenarios where Trump flips Nevada, Rhode Island, and New Jersey (not to mention New York) but in those cases I have to quote Candidate Biden: “Come on, man.”
Scenario 2: Likeliest Trump Re-Election Scenario (280-258 for Trump)
This scenario posits a narrow victory for Trump of 280 EV, which would probably lead to some very ugly post-election scenes on American streets. This scenario requires Trump to hold Pennsylvania (see my Penn argument in Scenario 1 for my ideas on the likelihood of this) while running the table on North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona. While that’s not unprecedented (I mean, he did it in 2016) it’s probably not going to happen at this stage in the game. The Democrat focus on Georgia and Texas in the final days of the campaign plus the polling directionality holds the strong possibility of Biden managing to flip Georgia, if not Texas. Biden only has to win one of the five mentioned states, four of which he currently (narrowly) leads in aggregate polling. So Trump would have to get a huge swing of the remaining undecideds (and drive them out to the polls in the first place) in Penn + the five above, and spend piles of money he doesn’t have on legal attacks in those six states. I’ll get into potentials for each of those in following scenarios, but straight up: I find the idea that Biden can’t flip ONE of these states unlikely in general.
Scenario 3: Bets Hedged, Erring Conservative: The Narrow Biden Win (279-259 for Biden)
Another scenario with a narrow win that ends up causing unrest in both American institutions and society at large. This case has Biden flip Wisconsin and Michigan (likely) and Pennsylvania (probable) while simultaneously getting hit by big undecided swings or polling errors in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona. It’s entirely likely and it’s a Biden win, but maybe a Phyrric one given the state of the Republic. This would require a popular vote lead of maybe around 3.5-4% for Biden, which is low given the aggregate but within the lower confidence bounds of some recent polling (leaving aside the quality of those polls, of course). It also requires Trump to get over some pretty deep structural problems in Florida, which I’ll talk about in the next scenario.
Scenario 4: Pollsters Redemption Arc 2020 (350-188 for Biden)
This scenario requires pollsters to be more or less bang-on, which is possible but maybe less likely than Scenario 3. In this one Biden flips Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Arizona, but where Trump holds Texas. This scenario is entirely likely once all the votes are counted – a scenario itself that requires WI, MI, and let’s say FL to be early decisive calls, making a Biden win a fait accompli and ending the likelihood of Trump spending the threadbare GOP war chest on lawyers. Why do I think Florida is possibly an early call? Old people. Recent FL polling has shown some very interesting demographic breakdowns. As it turns out, Biden is clearly winning the vote among the 18-34 age group and the 65+ age group, with a narrow lead in the 35-44 group and a loss in the 45-64 age group. Seniors in Florida are breaking for Biden (something about the government’s COVID response) and the sheer number of sun-baked old people in Florida is, for me, likely to deliver the state for Biden. It’s also an eastern seaboard state, so if Biden’s lead is pretty clear by 9:30-10 PM, it could actually be an early night after all. A lot of things have to go right, of course, including a muted amount of vote-counting shenanigans, but less likely scenarios have come to pass and most of this map is entirely probable. The only iffy state in this scenario (given let’s say a 7-8% lead nationally) for me is North Carolina, where the President’s numbers have been pretty strongly competitive for a while now.
Scenario 5: Texas Goes Blue (389-149 for Biden)
This is, as you can tell, the same as Scenario 4 except Texas flips and the GOP loses their minds. This is iffy but possible. Texas has taken to early voting in a huge way this election and their turnout is trending to be up sharply. If undecideds break for Biden in a big way then this is a possible map and one that will cause much beard-stroking and pontificating among pundits for the next four years. Democrats have had their hearts broken about Texas before – the Beto vs. Cruz matchup in 2018 led to much gnashing of teeth – and even a Biden win won’t likely flip the Senate seat, since Sen. John Cornyn seems to have a pretty solid lead by all accounts. Still, Texas has grown appreciably bluer every year since 2016 and it’s not out of the realm of possibility for this to happen. After all, California was a red state until it wasn’t.
Scenario 6: The Fabled Blue Wave (419-119 for Biden)
It’s a mark of how crazy this year is that this scenario is actually possible. It is, at any rate, more possible than Scenario 1. Everything has to go right, no vote counting shenanigans can occur, and the stars have to be properly aligned. Still, it’s not crazy. I’ve talked about the other states that are flipped here in previous scenarios but this adds some big pickups: Iowa, Ohio, and Montana. I don’t think flipping those three are likely, but in a scenario where we enter into Biden landslide territory (national popular vote lead by more than 10%), they become increasingly more possible. The polls are pretty close in Iowa: Trump looks to be in the lead but that lead is less than 2% on average. Ohio is a little more out of reach; the Trump lead there is comfortably around 3-4% on average and he’ll probably hold it. Montana is a fun one – there hasn’t been a pile of polling there and ostensibly Trump has a lead of around 5%, but it’s a state he carried by 20% in 2016 and it’s a state that’s not so much kneejerk-red as they are conservative, in that they tend over time to vote for who they think will do a better job overall. Alaska is another slowly-transitioning state that has been counted as reliably red for a long time; Trump won it by 15% in 2016 and is only carrying it in the polls by 5-6% this cycle. They’re the closest thing you’ll find to swing states in Trump’s red firewall and while they’re unlikely to be a flip, in crazy Scenario 6 anything’s possible.
Scenario 7: Pure Chaos (269-269, tie goes to the House of Representatives)
The most horrifying of scenarios, where Trump holds Pennsylvania while Biden flips Arizona, Trump holds the other swing states, and Trump wins both Nebraska’s second electoral district and Maine’s second electoral district. It’s entirely possible, and it’s one reason why Washington D.C. businesses have spent the weekend boarding up their storefronts and foreign countries are issuing travel advisories for the United States, citing the potential for post-election civil unrest. That unrest will probably happen regardless, but it’s a stone guarantee that it will happen after this scenario. This is a likely Trump win, by the way: the election goes to the House where the Reps gather by state to vote, and the gerrymandering the GOP has been engaged in for 25 years finally pays off big for them. The Democrats have a majority in the House (a majority set to expand in January) but on a count by state they will likely lose. Aren’t the arcane rules of American democracy fun? They should probably have just worked out a formula whereby there was an odd number of electoral voters so that ties couldn’t happen, but the Founding Fathers were also wasted when they wrote the Constitution, so I suppose you can’t expect too much out of the framework.
Scenario 8: It’s Britney, Bitch
The end came much as we expected, with our hands around each others throats, scrambling madly for the last dried-out crumbs. Overhead the vultures circle thirstily, their sleek silver machines hanging suspended in the rarefied air.
More Verin Mathwin
at the jetty we can see the wind
blowing out to stir the sailboat’s cloth
nothing lives outside the stress-torn sand
we live on, shoulder to shoulder at the
end of a roiling eternity
we didn’t mean to set the forest on fire
the great deserts in the center of it all
stand mute proof to the foolishness of
apologies and apologia and all apologism
Good evening. Here is new Verin Mathwin.
lime and limpet lovelies
lay adorned upon the sea
and every mother’s ugly was
a gorgeous sight to me
there’s a mall beside the breakwater
stripped into the wind
the ocean is a rolling thunder
salt spray, scarred in skins
Irrepressible, off-the-wall, and more than a little absurd, indie musician (Sandy) Alex G has made a career out of two things since dropping his debut in 2014: being as prolific as Ty Segall and being even more willing to play whatever the hell has come into his head in the last five minutes. House of Sugar marks his first album not put together in his bedroom but it keeps the manic, playlist-on-shuffle feel of his previous music. There’s just MORE of it – more instruments, more voices, more ideas.
Teen pop phenoms are almost always obnoxious – Donny Osmond and Justin Beiber were both awful in their own special ways. 2019’s teen pop phenom, Billie Eilish, manages to avoid this through the virtue of being really ridiculously good. Someone online – I forget who – called her ASMR pop and there’s a lot to that, really. Her style is like she took the mic into her closet and whispered her darkest secrets into it; these Whisper confessions were then laced over solid arrangements that both embrace and subvert pop conventions. An insane debut for a 17 year old, and a harbinger of big things to come.
Hot Chip have put out their fair share of mediocre songs, but they’ve somehow avoided putting out a bad album. A Bath Full Of Ecstasy follows in that tradition; it presents a series of solid dance floor grooves that have the usual dark concerns laced under it – abandonment, the absurdity of existence, uncertainty of faith. Like the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode before them, Hot Chip have always known that there is more to the club than escapist bliss.
Album #1 from the absurdly prolific Aussie psych band takes a dive back into the feel-good post-psych of the Seventies and reinvents the band’s sound for the umpteenth time in order to be a feel-good prog-funk band. What if Chilliwack was actually good? Gizzard answers the question no one was asking.
Also, uh, that album cover.
As far as years to end decades on, you could do worse than 2019. You could do better, of course; both 1969 and 1989 were world-shakers when it came to music (among everything else). But it’s not like 2019 was 2009, when the best album came out in January and everything else was just sort of okay after that. It wasn’t 1999 either, when we were mired in nu-metal and rap-rock, hip hop was still stuck in it’s Gucci-vacation mode, and jazz was still something for old people to tap their toes to while they were waiting on the final heart attack. That year gave us Woodstock ’99, and the less said of that the better.
Rock ‘n’ roll didn’t fare very well throughout the decade, depending on your perspective. A lot of it’s best moments were pretty underground; mainstream rock is a horrorshow that can be best encapsulated in that Billboard chart of the best rock songs of the decade that has numbers one through three occupied by Imagine Dragons. Hip hop, though, has progressed rapidly and weirdly through a strong experimental phase, the haters be damned. The comeback of jazz is in many ways the story of music in the teens, or the tens, or whatever we’re calling this past decade. There will be a number of entries in these three categories and more on this list, of course, but it’s good to take these final entries and use them to take stock of where we’ve been. For many artists, taking the decade challenge is extremely instructive, especially for the one sitting at the #1 spot this year. This is true of many of the artists in the top 20, several of whom were forging names for themselves in the underground in 2009, and others who were at a career crossroads back then.
