Several people have suggested that with a change in administration perhaps Hilbert and Hopper could become First Pets. I asked them about this, and they assured me that although they were as patriotic as the next cat they really weren’t interested in being demoted from emperor and empress of the universe. Maybe some dumb dog would be interested?

While we all sit around pondering the political universe while we’re waiting for Pennsylvania and Georgia and Nevada to announce final results, I would like to post a chart that I’ve posted many times before. It’s from Gallup, and it shows how many people consider themselves liberal vs. conservative:

The good news is that liberals have been making progress over the past few decades. The bad news is that we’re still a small minority. Only about a quarter of the country considers itself liberal, way behind the number who consider themselves conservative. Like it or not, this is the playing field. Here’s a breakdown by demographic group:

There is literally only one demographic group which is more than one-third liberal: people with postgraduate degrees. Every single other group—whether broken down by gender, age, income, race, or region—is well under a third liberal. Even among the youngest voters, only 30 percent consider themselves liberal.

I always hear a bunch of wishful thinking when I post this stuff, but none of it holds water. America is not yet a country that considers itself liberal, or even close to it. This is the underlying foundation of everything. Whatever your strategy for winning more elections, this is where you start from.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

Are you one of those Democrats who’s disappointed because the election wasn’t a landslide? Because Republicans actually made gains in the House and might have retained control of the Senate? I have some advice for you.

Just turn on the TV and listen to President Trump. Listen to him bellyaching about how the election was a fraud. Listen to lie after lie after lie about illegal ballots. Listen to him demanding that we stop the count in some states and keep counting in others. Listen to him do his utmost to wreck American democracy.

And then tell yourself: No matter what happened in the other races, we might soon no longer have this piece of human excrement sullying the White House. That should perk you right up.

The American economy gained 638,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined to 6.9 percent. It’s good news that job creation is still positive, but it’s bad news that the rate of job creation seems to have flattened out long before we’ve made up the losses of March and April:

There was other bad news too: The number of medium-term unemployed (15-26 weeks) declined substantially, but the number of long-term unemployed (26+ weeks) went up.

Average earnings were slightly higher in October. After adjusting for inflation, blue-collar workers saw their wages increase by about 1 percent.

Joe Biden is now ahead in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. It’s all over for Donald Trump. Nonetheless:

Of course not. I would no more expect a concession from Donald Trump than I would from a five-year-old. He will exit the White House the same way he entered it: whining and moaning about how unfair everything is. It’s all he knows.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 5. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How’s my shy little election rosebud doing? Well, it’s springtime in America and it’s bursting into bloom! Other, more reputable news outlets might be too weak-kneed to finally admit that Joe Biden is the winner of the election, but not me. With Arizona in the bag and only Clark County left to be counted in Nevada, I hereby declare Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States. So there.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 4. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Paul Christian Gordon/ZUMA

I don’t know that I trust myself yet to say anything about the election, but there’s a little bit I can say.

First, no matter what else, and no matter how close the count was, it looks like Donald Trump is being tossed out of the White House. This is an unalloyed good thing and we should all be breathing a huge sigh of relief over it.

That said, Joe Biden’s victory represents only a tiny change in the vote compared to 2016. Trumpism wasn’t rejected—he probably would have won if not for the pandemic—and liberalism wasn’t embraced. At this point, Republicans still need to come to grips with how Trump took over their party, but Democrats need to come to grips with the fact that they remain a generally unloved alternative. I have my own ideas about why that is, which I’ll keep to myself for the time being, but it’s something that needs to be addressed in a clear-eyed way. No more hiding behind popular vote victories or polls claiming to show that everyone loves our policies. It’s obvious that both are misleading. Nor is the answer for the party to be more vigorous about supporting your personal policy preferences. That’s just lazy.

This is all going to be discussed to death over the next few months, and we’re all going to get sick of it. But the worst thing liberals can do is to keep piddling down the same path as always without giving it much thought. We need to do better.

Valery Sharifulin/TASS via ZUMA

What happened with the political polling this year? How did it manage to be so far off?

Without doing a deep dive, here’s the nutshell answer. It’s always been the case that not everyone answers the telephone when pollsters call. This produces a non-random sample, which pollsters have to correct using models to reweight the sample so it matches the actual electorate.

But in recent years, this problem has become acute: response rates to polling calls have plummeted to around 5 percent these days. This produces a massively lopsided sample, which in turn puts a lot of pressure on the model weights to correct things. It’s now gotten to the point where everything depends on the accuracy of the model, and if the model is off then the polling numbers are worthless. But this produces something of a tautology: the goal of the model is to emulate the “real” electorate, but there’s never any way to be sure you’ve done that since the real electorate is what you’re trying to measure in the first place.

In 2016 the models failed to adjust properly for educational levels among likely voters. In 2020 pollsters corrected for that but obviously failed to account for something else. Eventually they’ll figure out what it was. And there’s no guarantee that they’ll get it right in 2024, which might have some entirely different problem.

It’s unclear if this is a solvable problem. Perhaps we need some entirely different way of measuring public opinion—though I’m not sure what that might be. In any case, if we don’t figure out how to fix this it might be the end of political polling as we know it.