#close elections

British Columbia held provincial elections on October 19th. It has, like Canada's federal government, a system of government similar to that of the UK.

A party must win a majority of seats in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly to form a government in the province.

So eight days after the election, the incumbent New Democratic Party (NDP) has won or is leading in 46 seats, the Conservative Party has won or is leading in 45, and the Green Party has won 2 seats. 47 seats are needed for a majority in the 93 seat chamber.

So there are two ridings (Canadian for legislative districts) where recounts are taking place on Sunday and Monday. One of them is Surrey-Guildford. The incumbent NDP member is currently down by just 12 votes.

So if Garry Begg picks up just 13 votes in the recount and counting of absentee ballots, he will win the riding and the NDP will continue in power in British Columbia.

In the election for Virginia’s House of Delegates, one race was decided by a single vote.

Never say, never think “My vote won’t make any difference.”

A lot of Trump supporters still try to hide their racism by claiming they vote for Trump because he's allegedly a great businessman. 🤨

A lengthy list of Trump’s disastrous business deals — compiled by his newest business partners

Trump was not great at business. He's a nepo baby who got tons of money from Daddy Fred and stupidly squandered much of it. At best, he was a con man who managed to swindle some people out of their money. Remember Trump University?

Trump wasn't great at business but his cleverly edited TV series "The Apprentice" made him seem like he was.

How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success With "The Apprentice," the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency.

Jonathon Braun, an editor who started working with Burnett on “Survivor” and then worked on the first six seasons of “The Apprentice,” told me, “You don’t make anything up. But you accentuate things that you see as themes.” He readily conceded how distorting this process can be. Much of reality TV consists of reaction shots: one participant says something outrageous, and the camera cuts away to another participant rolling her eyes. Often, Braun said, editors lift an eye roll from an entirely different part of the conversation. [ ... ] At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”

Trump is trying now to "reverse engineer" his presidency. And he's helped by smarmy Republicans like Nikki Haley who once condemned the January 6th assault on the US Capitol but are now making excuses for it.

Trump is a raging phony whose reputation was rescued and curated by TV producer Mark Burnett in the 2000s.

As for the Trump-China Scandal, it's big news even in Hong Kong.

Donald Trump reaped US$5.5 million from China and its state entities during presidency: US House report

When you understand that Republicans are not entirely cookie cutter, you can frame messaging to instigate division among the various GOP subgroups.

Data journalist Nate Cohn separates the GOP into six groupings based on poll responses regarding various issues.

In a specific state or legislative district you might be able shape issues in such a way as to make a Republican candidate seem unpalatable to certain elements within the party. Even if disaffected Republicans don't vote for the Democratic candidate outright, they may simply skip voting for any candidate for that particular office.

In Arizona in 2022 the GOP nominated a particularly dreadful slate of candidates for statewide office. They lost by several percentage points even while the GOP did passably in downballot races.

[W]hile majorities of Republicans side with Mr. Trump on almost every issue, those majorities are often quite slim: Around 40 percent of Republican-leaning voters support aid to Ukraine, support comprehensive immigration reform or say abortion should be mostly or always legal.