What we learned

Pollsters

They have tried to weight their models correctly. Try as they might though, they were not able to capture the ridiculous movement in our politics known as Trump/Q-Anon, encouraging voters to not answer pollsters and giving the quite ludicrous impression that Biden was socialist.
If you understood this, Florida’s result would have been obvious from the projected margin.
Not to mention the traction almost every incumbent has in any election.

Individuals

The culture wars aren’t your normal type of war. They aren’t the usual fun kind where you get to run around no-scoping nazi zombies.
They’re a way of winning hearts and minds through fear than fact. That is dangerous – but it favours the right wing in a massive way.
Somehow Joe Biden is going to put landlords into camps for having the temerity to own a natural monopoly. But for some reason throwing undesirables in camps isn’t the beginning of nazism.
One side is so unknown – the socialist form of fascism- it remains nebulous and projectable.
The other is so well known and parodied that there is no fear of it whatsoever. Who could believe Trump is a nazi if he doesn’t do a fun goose-step and wear gleaming arm-bands the whole time?

And the far right media plays into the fears of the majority by giving a platform to extremist believers in CRT (Critical Race Theory) who believe that objective reality isn’t true and we must segregate people to make them safe.
To be clear – mainstream CRT is useful as a way of seeing the world through another’s eyes and understanding that no place is a meritocracy, life-chances fundamentally founded on stakes made hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Stock markets

On the left the joke is that the election was decided back in the 80’s – the Oligrachs will win. They’re right. Markets in america have seen next to no turbulence, knowing that if trump wins it’s tax cuts, if Biden wins its inflationary fiscal policy all the way home.
Europe has been fascinating – they obviously fear a Trump presidency. Perhaps it’s the aggression from Russia which will be redoubled in misinforming the eastern portion that used to be within the iron curtain (though notably, even the most Catholic of states have almost no momentum out of the EU-bubble- perhaps they practice the principle of ‘the devil you know and who doesn’t try and make you a powerless satelite with no voice-box’).

Russia

Whatever happens, they’re ballin’. If Biden wins a razor-thin majority, they will pump the airwaves with ‘fake mail-in ballots’ propaganda.

At that point, the only thing that America would have to fear is fear itself. It would need to have a strong, moralistic and reasonable foundation to prevent its descent into a short attempt at limited rebellions (that would be put down in short order- no question about it) that in turn fuels greater and greater violence in the years ahead.

If Trump wins, Putin can safely set his sights on everything from exclusive mining rights in the North to destabilisng European states in the west. The world would be his funky-smelling and out of date crustacean.

The UK

Bye bye trade deal, or maybe not.
If we do get one then it will be because we will have to cave on the internal market’s bill. If we do that, then the Tory party- more likely Boris’ premiership- will die a death from a thousand cuts.
If Boris refuses to leave pointing out the dearth of earth on the tory benches (they fell for the ‘starving poor children’ bear-trap Labour laid out for them, hardly budding Machiavels. Ben Bradley opening up his own personal whirlpool of khak-covered pringles-paid-prostitutes and dairylee-dunker-driven-drug-dealers to drown in) then see the rise of the Stewart’s perhaps(?), opening up the field for a Lab/SNP/LD coalition to take the crown- made of copper and glue gunned plastic gems as it may be.

More likely is the rise of the Dishy-Rishi, with an attempted hop-skip-and-krump from Cummings. I think he’s too much of a toxic brand now, and not so exceptional a helmsman that the diamond-encrusted-rudder could make up for the mega-rats gnawing on the rigging.

If he becomes leader, Labour is in real peril. Smoth, charming, and oblivious to difficulty in a way one could only pick up as a banker. At that point though, it is likely that the numerous economic hits will have broken the government in a way no leader has set up for themselves, bar Tsar Nicholas. No comment about how eerily similar the current UK is economically, socially, and politically as Russia was then.

Labour’s only option then is to harnass the culture war for its own good. But that would be difficult- comment again about the nebulous fears incumbent with falling into the shadow of the USSR but not the crony-capitalist, migrant hating, largely incompetent Nazi’s. No comment.

The future

God does not play dice, but he does like practical jokes

Not Albert Einstein

It won’t be fun, it won’t be smooth. The suffering has begun and only when we all understand that we are infallible, our favoured talking heads are in fact rambunctious bottoms, and that we must be individuals that spread (and eliminate) risk as a collective, can we be happy as a world or even country once more.