Good morning. It is November 4th. It's supposed to be a cloudy day in New York, but there's a little sun shining at the moment. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Conditions are smoky back in my old hometown of Aberdeen, Maryland, according to the vestigial remains of the local newspaper as processed through the Baltimore Sun, because fires are burning on Aberdeen Proving Ground producing what the paper describes as a “putrid, smoky smell,” and casting a pall of smoke over the Route 40 corridor. The story contains two pretty noteworthy assertions about the problem of wildfire on the vast grounds of the Army Weapon Testing Facility, citing a Facebook message from the Chestertown Volunteer Fire Company. The paper reports, “due to a large number of unexploded ordnance in the testing area that the fire appears to be burning, the post said it is far too dangerous to deploy personnel on the ground for fire suppression, which has led to the proving grounds, ‘let it burn’ policy for range fires.” The story also notes the post explained that given the testing activity at the base, “fires are inevitable,” especially in the current drought like conditions by inevitable there. seem to mean inevitable within the normal real world paradigm of not doing stuff that starts fires when you're in the middle of a drought especially when the potential burn area is littered with more than a century's worth of unexploded munitions. Hope they at least cleaned up the stuff from World War I. 

Quincy Jones died at the age of 91, leaving behind an unparalleled body of popular musical work and some of the spiciest interviews ever put on the record. 

The New York Times tech guild is on strike as of today, holding the website's accursed election needle hostage in the name of getting a “just cause” clause in their contract and other concessions. The virtual picket line stretches between Times users and the Recipes app and the Games section. So don't play the Wordle today unless you want to be an S-C-A-B, which isn't even five letters. 

On the front of this morning's physical New York Times, the two column headline is, “Tightest contest in decades grows tighter at finish.” A perfect windup to a campaign season in which the newspaper could not tell the difference between an election and election coverage. It is, of course, absurd to claim that the presidential contest is the “tightest one in decades,” when both of the previous two presidential races were decided by narrow margins in a small handful of states, producing in one case an electoral college result opposite the popular vote result. Both “tightest contest” and “grows tighter at finish” are bullshit in the philosophical sense of the term. Assertions made without reference to truth or falsity. They're not propositions about the election at all, but about the polling, or about these stories being told about the polling. 

The right-hand column of the double bill has the sub-headline, “Shift in swing states, Times poll finds.” That's the same time scene a poll that's been spitting sparks and making weird noises all through election season. The Times' chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, was on social media yesterday offering his simultaneously pious and hand-wringing argument that you can't really know anything from the polls anyway, despite his having advanced very specific arguments about the mood of various demographic and geographic slices of the electorate teased out of the tiny cross tabs of the Times' wildly oscillating polling. 

So today, the paper’s story begins, “The presidential race appears to be hurtling toward a photo finish with the final set of polls by the New York Times and Siena College finding Vice President Kamala Harris showing new strength in North Carolina and Georgia as former President Donald J. Trump erases her lead in Pennsylvania and maintains his advantage in Arizona.” The story continues. “Ms. Harris is now narrowly ahead in Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin., the polls show, while Mr. Trump leads in Arizona.The polls show them locked in close races in Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. But the results in all seven states are within the margin of sampling error, meaning neither candidate has a definitive lead in any of them.” When the Times says, “the polls show,” what the Times means is “the polls fail to show.” None of these plot points mean anything. Nobody knows if some other state that nobody's even bothered polling might go weird this year. But again, none of this is about whether the election is close, just about whether the preview coverage of the election is capable of figuring out what's going on. And, given that Donald Trump's plans to steal the election this time around revolve around convincing his followers that a clean Harris victory is impossible, definitively declaring that the race is tight when you know no such thing is journalistic malpractice. Except malpractice supposes the existence of medicine, and political reporting right now is 100 percent humors and bloodletting. 

The left-hand companion to the polls piece is “A stressed electorate eagerly votes early.” Speaking of the humors. “An anxious America, weary from a vitriolic campaign season and worried about the state of the nation's democracy, is voting with determination, with roughly 75 million people having cast ballots in the early voting period.” This is just election night vamping starting a day and a half early, and in print. After the jump, the Times writes, “The huge early vote turnout for the second straight presidential election has added to the unpredictability of the razor-thin race for president and revealed a paradox in modern politics. Armed with more data about who has actually cast early ballots, campaigns can now more easily understand how well they are faring based on their own vote models, and which small sliver of voters they still need to target in a frantic get-out-the-vote push. But,” the Times continues, “all of that data is essentially set against a vacuum of historical comparisons because of the sea change in American voting behavior caused by the 2020 election. That contest set in motion a new process of electing a president with wholesale shifts to early voting, yet it was also held in a deadly pandemic that fueled voters' choices.” Fueled? Anyway, yeah. Early voting is more available. More people are doing it. The electorate is in the middle of adopting a new set of habits. Precedent is useless. Everybody still has to say something. 

More helpfully on the Jump page, there's a large format item running down how long it might actually take to get results from the battlefield states. Georgia and North Carolina are supposed to be fast. Michigan is supposed to be improving. Pennsylvania is expected to drag out. Wisconsin requires a marathon count that should wrap up Wednesday. Arizona and Nevada are under “could take days.” 

Back on page one, under a photo of the New York Marathon, the leftmost news column is “In final days, frenetic race for key states. That's a different story than a stressed electorate who really votes early. 

Next to that, in news analysis, the Times does one more catch-up piece. “Torrent of lies redefines political norms. Over a lifetime, Trump has fabricated his version of reality.” He sure has, but since he's been doing it over a lifetime, why is it showing up on the doorstep on November 4th? 

And down at the bottom right, “Republicans may snatch Senate should a few races fall in line. After two years and a multi-billion dollar barrage of political attack ads,” the Times writes, “the fight for Senate control is down to a handful of races with Republicans holding a clear edge, but Democrats maintaining a narrow path to retaining their majority if events break their way.” Not sure what the difference is between “Republicans may snatch Senate should a few races fall in line” and “Democrats may hold Senate should a few races fall in line.” Sometimes it's good to remember that two years ago, the consensus about the Senate was that structurally, given which seats in which states were in play, the only question was by how large a margin the Republicans would seize control. Now it's election eve and nobody knows if they're even going to do it at all. 

Inside the paper on page A17, while all the vibes and unknowable horse race coverage had page one, the story is that James O'Keefe, the Times writes, “conservative influencer who founded and formerly led Project Veritas has assembled a core of election workers and poll monitors planning to secretly film voting and ballot counting in states across the country. Many states,” the Times writes, “prohibit filming at election sites and have laws protecting voter privacy and barring election interference. Mr. O'Keefe acknowledged the legal risk on social media last week, writing that ‘in some cases it is illegal for the activists in the field to record, but it is legal for me to publish what you send me so long as I play no part in the recording.’” Somewhere down the line, if we still have a court system, this is going to presumably mean more defamation awards. Meanwhile, it's just messy people, presumably bankrolled by our deranged plutocrat class, setting out to make a mess of the vote counting. Take a deep breath, pace yourself. It'll all be over sometime between tomorrow night and 2028. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Our ongoing Pursuit of Podcasting Adequacy™ is funded by you, the listeners, through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your use of the tip button. Again, steady breaths. And if all goes well, we will talk again tomorrow.