- President Joe Biden (compassionately) owning a heckler at his Maryland rally

Alright, everyone: we’re here. Let’s take a deep breath. Before we get into The News, there’s a few important things to remember as we hyperventilate into one million paper bags. 

• First, we will not know all the results of today’s midterm elections tonight, or even tomorrow in some cases. As with the 2020 Election, millions of people have voted by mail or with absentee ballots, and those cannot begin to be counted until today. As Big Lie Republicans radicalize their voters against absentee voting, this will give rise in some states to a “red mirage”—Don’t freak out. Wait for all of the votes to be counted. As a matter of avoiding needless self-torture, stay away from the early-exit polls entirely. Don’t doom scroll, don’t obsessively check the dreaded election needle. Hell, stop reading this newsletter if you want! Forget I was ever born! Whatever you need to take care of yourself.

• Okay, now that we’re all feeling serene, let’s head into the news. In Philadelphia, PA, one of the cities that garnered national attention in the 2020 election, city commissioners voted 2-1 to reinstate what is known as poll-book reconciliation—cross-checking mail ballots to make sure no one who submitted one also voted in person—during an emergency meeting this morning. City election officials expected to have nearly all votes counted by tomorrow morning, but the vote to reinstate poll book reconciliations means vote tallying will take longer. 

• In Florida (you know where this is headed) the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has refused to allow Justice Department election monitors to go inside polling locations in South Florida, saying in a letter that the federal government’s involvement would be “counterproductive” and “potentially undermine confidence in the election.” Republicans expressing concern about undermining confidence in elections? We never thought we’d see the day. The chief counsel for Florida’s secretary of state office, Brad McVay, said that the DeSantis administration would send its own monitors to the three Florida counties in question, which are among the most populous and Democratic-leaning in the state. What a fun coincidence!

While we’re here, let’s round up some of the other news to be aware of as election results come in tonight and tomorrow.
 

• A judge declined to issue an order that would have prevented or delayed the counting of military ballots in Wisconsin yesterday. Unlike most states, Wisconsin allows military members to cast absentee ballots without registering to vote or providing proof of residency. Also yesterday, a judge in Arizona blocked a county’s plan to conduct a full hand-count of ballots from today’s election, which was of course requested by Republican officials and activists claiming falsely that vote-counting machines are untrustworthy Abortion is on the ballot in Michigan, Kentucky, and California, as voters decide whether to enshrine or strip abortion rights from their state constitutions. Voters in Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota (a rather conservative grouping of states!) will decide whether to approve recreational marijuana. 

• Today’s midterm elections and the conversations surrounding them are the culmination of two years of the Big Lie, peddled nonstop by disgraced former president Trump and his loyalists. The paranoia and pre-emptive efforts to discredit the results of today’s elections have been long underway by the right-wing. Cindy Otis, a former technology officer and CIA analyst who researches disinformation crystallized this issue and highlighted how popular these false claims have become, saying, “We’re looking at entire social media platforms, independent news commentary websites and social media influencers who are starting from a place of ‘Elections are rigged against conservatives’ and covering the election from there.” This is a reality that we on the left both need to come to terms with and formulate a plan to meaningfully address if we want to uphold democracy now and in the future. 

Are we feeling relaxed yet? In all seriousness, it took two weeks to call every state in 2020, so we just won’t have a good idea of where we’re at tonight. The fun little quirks of the United States election system are somewhat predictable. And regardless of what the Fox News set wants you to believe, they aren’t indicative of fraud or malfeasance.

In a Monday night interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the recent attack on her husband Paul by a right-wing extremist will impact her decision about whether to retire. The Speaker declined to elaborate on how exactly her decision will be affected, but Pelosi, 82, had promised back in 2018 that this term as Speaker would be her last. The state of California charged Paul Pelosi’s assailant, David DePape, with attempted murder, burglary, and elder abuse, while the Department of Justice charged him with assault of an immediate family member of a U.S. official and attempted kidnapping of a U.S. official. In her interview with Cooper, Pelosi said that the Republican Party is engaging in a one-sided assault on democracy, and called on the GOP to stop the disinformation. Republican disinformation and the Big Lie, she said, are “without any question a source of what happened on January 6, and the denial of that, and then a source of what’s happening to me now.”

Republicans won all their statewide races in Florida. 
 

A Qatar World Cup ambassador told a German television broadcaster that he believes homosexuality is “damage in the mind.”

Twitter CEO and billionaire nightmare Elon Musk may put all of Twitter behind a paywall. Good luck with that!

As international climate talks occur in Egypt this week, the small island nation of Tuvalu proposed a fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty, modeled on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. 

Facebook’s parent company Meta is reportedly planning to announce large-scale layoffs tomorrow, which could affect thousands of the company’s 87,000 employees worldwide. 

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said today that he will begin consulting all elected parties tomorrow before asking a candidate to form a new government after a far-right coalition won majorities last week, leaving former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu likely to receive the nomination. Netanyahu is currently on trial over corruption charges, which should keep him busy. 

A White student at the University of Kentucky who was caught on tape assaulting and repeatedly using a racial slur against a Black student will withdraw from the school. 

Flu cases resulting in hospitalizations in the U.S. hit a 10-year high as vaccinations fell dramatically from past years. Get your flu shot, you sickos!

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has suggested that he is open to peace talks with Russia, softening a prior refusal to negotiate. Zelenskyy made an appeal to the international community to “force Russia into real peace talks,” this week, a course reversal from a decree he signed in September stating “the impossibility of holding talks” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nevertheless, Zelenskyy’s conditions for peace talks—including the return of all of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied lands, compensation for war damage and the prosecution of war crimes—would most likely be non-starters for Russia. Kyiv’s new “openness” to peace talks is largely seen as a tactical move to maintain support from the West, who are crucial to Ukrainian success, some of whom bristled at Zelenskyy’s professed inflexibility. Russia and Ukraine held several rounds of talks in Belarus and Turkey early in the war, and Zelenskyy repeatedly called for a personal meeting with Putin, but was rebuffed.

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Democrats Maura Healey and Wes Moore have flipped the governors mansions in Massachusetts and Maryland back to blue. 

The lawsuit brought by a California man claiming that Skittles are “unfit for human consumption” has been dismissed. Justice for Skittles.
 

The House January 6 Committee has interviewed the driver of disgraced former president Donald Trump’s presidential vehicle on the day of the Capitol insurrection as a follow-up to Cassidy Hutchinson’s explosive testimony back in June. 

Most Americans voted without major issues today, despite immense scrutiny and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.