The panic in the Trump resistance took hold Wednesday, six days out.
Let me be honest. As a person obsessed with the need for liberation of once-great America from this absurd excuse for a president, I was the one panicking.
The New York Times published an article that morning in which its reporter saw on the ground in suburban Philadelphia something quite different from what the polls were saying, which was that Joe Biden was leading the state buoyed by suburban women.
It was all Trump all the time, and from women, in at least one Philly suburb, the article said.
As if to reinforce that, numbers guru Nate Silver was writing that Democrats should stop panicking because Biden could win the presidency without Pennsylvania. That struck me as a pre-emptive concession to the likelihood of a Hillary-esque last-minute loss in that state.
Donald Trump was rallying as if still on steroids all over the contested states. Biden, for some reason, was taking down time in Delaware for a briefing on something or other.
It all begin to feel like November 2016 and the autumn of American doom.
One thing was different from four years before: Biden had campaigned the day before in Georgia, and Kamala Harris was to campaign two days after in Texas, although logic indicated the Democrats were confusing hope with confidence in those purpling provinces.
Indeed, they were tied in polls in Georgia and close in Texas. But those remained, when you got down to it, likely Trump wins. Finishing a strong second in a state in an American presidential election nets you from that state exactly zero electors.
To lose the people 50.1-49.9 is to lose electors 100-0.
Little about being stronger than usual in Texas and Georgia portended anything tangible for Pennsylvania, which I believe to be the game--essential for both candidates--and a place of difficult political calculus.
Philadelphia is strongly Democratic, and its turnout is thus key. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton had her big election-eve event there. But the turnout the next day was not what she needed, and she was beaten in rural Pennsylvania. A preposterous second-place presidency was born.
Silver's point was that Biden could lose Pennsylvania and still win the electoral college with likely wins in Michigan and Wisconsin and do-able first-place showings in a decisive number of the old and new battleground states--Arizona, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Texas and Georgia.
That's true mathematically. But I've already discounted Texas and Georgia. And Biden's polling lead in Arizona eerily resembled Clinton's late showing. Ohio and Iowa are still most logically Trump states. And I don't trust any Southern state--certainly not Florida, and in this case North Carolina--to go against Trump.
Three states beat Clinton four years ago--Michigan, Wisconsin ... and Pennsylvania. The simplest way for Biden to win is to take them back. He seems pretty set in Michigan and Wisconsin, but those are famous last words from the past. And now Silver is doing calculations discounting the chances in Pennsylvania of good ol' Joe from Scranton.
To sum up the Pennsylvania situation: The New York Times sees Trump mania in a supposedly pro-Biden Philly suburb. Joe made trouble for himself with rural Pennsylvania frackers with his oil-industry honesty in the debate. And the latest question about Philadelphia is what the police shooting of a Black man and the ensuing looting and burning will do to the political turnout in the city and the reactive political climate along Pennsylvania's conservative countryside.
With all those factors swirling, I offer a prediction I assert to be bold and insightful but that probably will strike you as a cowardly hedge.
It is that either Biden will win big by taking some of those states where he's close and holding on in Pennsylvania, or the race will be a nail-biter with Biden taking none of them except maybe Pennsylvania, but only after the next-day counting of heavy absentee voting, which would lead to Trump's march into court to argue ... something.
Trump's position seems to be that he should be allowed to declare victory if at any point he goes ahead, and that no votes should be counted after that.
He has a U.S. Supreme Court that might be expected to let him have his way.
If it comes down to Pennsylvania, gird yourselves: Election Day votes will probably favor Trump, and he'll declare victory. But mail-in votes are massive, 2.6 million and rising, almost half the turnout, with almost three-fourths coming from registered Democrats. They'll be counted more slowly, over ensuing days.
Trump could well be overtaken in the decisive state by late-counted votes he'll ridiculously call fraudulent.
Litigation, social unrest, worse ... well, let's prioritize our panic, limiting it now to the election itself.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.