A message to pundits, pollsters and campaign consultants on election eve: 2020 is not 2016!

Net­work pun­dits, polit­i­cal con­sul­tants, and French army gen­er­als share a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion: They are often wound up in fight­ing the last war.

“Thee has been a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with 2016,” for­mer Oba­ma cam­paign man­ag­er David Plouffe said Mon­day morn­ing on MSNBC.

All over the air­waves, the weekend’s tele­vi­sion cov­er­age of Elec­tion 2020 seemed obsessed with find­ing “paths” where­by Don­ald Trump can repeat his 2016 upset Elec­toral Col­lege win. Tossup states blinked red on the big board.

Media exec­u­tives know high­er rat­ings are more like­ly if mil­lions of us are hang­ing on the edge of our seats, unable to move, so they have every rea­son to try to por­tray this elec­tion as extreme­ly com­pet­i­tive and down to the wire.

Brett Baier of Fox said the race is “tight­en­ing fast,” even as an NBC/Wall Street Jour­nal poll found Joe Biden with a 52–42 per­cent lead nation­al­ly, ahead by 51–46% in bat­tle­ground states, with a new Mon­mouth Poll putting Biden up 51–44% in piv­otal Pennsylvania.

Democ­rats are “wor­ried,” we were told. With­out Penn­syl­va­nia, “Biden becomes an under­dog,” said Nate Sil­ver of FiveThirtyEight.

Trump is sup­pos­ed­ly mak­ing Lati­no vote inroads in Florida.

Miami/Dade Coun­ty isn’t turn­ing out for the Democrats.

And, cour­tesy of Wash­ing­ton bred Trump strate­gist Jason Miller, the incum­bent is going to “flip” Neva­da and hold onto Arizona.

Vet­er­an Neva­da polit­i­cal writer John Ral­ston bat­ted down Miller’s pre­dic­tion with a tweet on Mon­day morn­ing, writ­ing: “It’s almost impos­si­ble for Trump to win the rurals by as much as Biden will win Clark County.”

A vast amount of chat­ter pre­cedes any election.

Trashy polls get equal treat­ment with the most pro­fes­sion­al of surveys.

When you look at their crosstabs, the Repub­li­can firm Trafal­gar Group pre­dicts that Trump will get a quar­ter of the vote from African Amer­i­can men.

In your dreams.

The real­i­ty out there is that we’re see­ing an unprece­dent­ed lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion. Nine­ty-five mil­lion votes have already been sub­mit­ted, approach­ing two thirds of the total 2016 turnout. Look at the nine mil­lion-plus votes already cast in Texas, plus or minus the 127,000 that Repub­li­cans have tried to get thrown out.

Many are from folks who’ve recent­ly moved to the Lone Star State, a and a sur­pris­ing num­ber come from young voters.

Georgia’s 2018 Demo­c­ra­t­ic guber­na­to­r­i­al can­di­date Stacey Abrams deserves a medal (and Cab­i­net post?) for declin­ing a pres­i­den­tial run, and instead fight­ing vot­er sup­pres­sion in the Peachtree State. She has put Geor­gia in play, and lured Biden, Kamala Har­ris and Barack Oba­ma to cam­paign there. Impa­tience with vot­er sup­pres­sion has been met with the patience of those wait­ing hours to vote.

Park­land, Flori­da, mas­sacre sur­vivors with March For Our Lives have mount­ed a nation­wide cam­paign (large­ly unno­ticed in the media chat­ter) to get eigh­teen to thir­ty-four year olds to vote, poten­tial­ly Biden’s strongest elec­toral base.

All of this is to say, the elec­tion may be a ref­er­en­dum on Trump, but Biden is strong­ly favored to be our forty-sixth pres­i­dent. The chances of a “blue wave,” or even a blue tsuna­mi, are greater than Trump find­ing his path.

Trump is act­ing more like a cult chief­tain than a pathfinder.

He has picked a last minute fight with the nation’s pre­mier pan­dem­ic expert, Dr. Antho­ny Fau­ci. “Fire Fau­ci!” changed Trump’s crowd Sun­day night in pan­dem­ic-strick­en Wis­con­sin. The incum­bent implied he would do just that.

The per­fect Biden rejoin­der: “I got a bet­ter idea. Elect me and I’m going to hire Dr. Fau­ci. And we’re going to fire Don­ald Trump.”

Trump was out on the trail defend­ing his campaign’s bullyboys.

He praised the car­a­van of trucks and cars, sport­ing Trump-Pence flags, which sur­round­ed a Biden-Har­ris bus Sun­day in Texas, forc­ing it to slow to twen­ty miles per hour and then try­ing to force it off the road.

He was in North Car­oli­na on Mon­day, denounc­ing a Fox announc­er for (alleged­ly) low­balling the size of his crowd, and describ­ing Fox’s poll­ster as a fake and fraud for the network’s lat­est fig­ures: Biden 52 per­cent and Trump 44 percent.

To hear Trump decry the clos­est thing the Repub­li­can Par­ty has to a par­ty-owned tele­vi­sion chan­nel is like wit­ness­ing L’Osservatore Romano denounc­ing the Pope.

Hence, there’s much rea­son for hope, to calm the nerves, tune out the chat­ter, and fun­nel your activism not to fret­ting but to boost­ing Washington’s already spec­tac­u­lar turnout. Will King Coun­ty get to nine­ty per­cent? Hope so.

It’ll be grand fun to tell British Colum­bia friends that our pan­dem­ic-strick­en elec­tion pro­duced a far high­er vot­er turnout than theirs.