Opinion: These are nervous times for lovers of democracy and the rule of law in the United States, and many of us are having trouble not monitoring every tiny twist and turn in the presidential election forecast. Below is an effort to detail a day in the life of one such person.
3.30am: Was I awakened by my full bladder or by election stress with a side of bladder emptying? Doesn’t matter, but before going back to sleep. I make the mistake of checking Nate Silver’s 538 election forecast to see if Kamala Harris’s probability of winning has ticked up since I last checked, seconds before I hit the sack. Surprise, surprise: it hasn’t.
6.30am: Awake again, for good this time, so I head downstairs to make coffee and read the front page of the Washington Post, making sure to close my eyes most of the way before taking in the top headline in case it’s worse than usual. Gloss over news of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, opting instead to read a story about the recent unearthing of JD Vance’s law school tweets asserting his undying fondness for Taylor Swift and videos of cats chasing laser pointers. His spokesperson calls it fake news, and clearly the work of a jealous classmate or other liberal bot.
8am: Head to the gym to work off some of the election-induced stress. Begin my stint on an elliptical listening to music, as that always mellows me out, but I worry something important may have happened in the last seven minutes so I switch first to MSNBC to hear Bernie Sanders slamming drug companies for the fact Americans pay 20 times more for Ozempic than Germans. Then, as always, I’m driven to see what the bad guys are doing over on Fox, and am treated to a story about Venezuelan immigrants supposedly mooning old ladies in New York’s Central Park. Several blonde Fox women seem really upset about it. I’m sweating like crazy, which is weird since I stopped pedalling the elliptical 15 minutes ago to concentrate on what Bernie was saying.
Noon: To go with my organic, hyper-locally grown lunch salad, I’m sampling C-SPAN’s coverage of a House Homeland Security committee hearing on a proposal to require saliva samples from all eligible voters. “If you can’t spit, you must split,” barks Marjorie Taylor Greene, and in doing so ironically hits a back-of-the-room C-SPAN camera lens with a blob of her Maga spittle.
2.30pm: Nap time, as I’m thoroughly exhausted, so I put on some whale sounds to hopefully help me nod off, but they just remind me of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s bizarre whale-beheading incident, so I switch to Politico’s Playbook Deep Dive podcast, and fall asleep to a discussion of the voting history of a single cul-de-sac in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, which has successfully predicted the outcome of every presidential election since 1848.
7pm: Dinner time, and while my wife wants to discuss her garden’s fabulous bounty, that just reminds me of how unfair it is that the Democrats are being blamed for inflation’s high grocery prices, and how it’s way worse in Europe, and the next thing I know I’m dining alone, so I flip on CNBC’s Squawk Box to listen to a couple of billionaires whine about China and interest rates while I finish my air-fried tofu.
11pm: After some soothing and uplifting late-night fare, say, an episode of Taskmaster NZ, Season 2 – that Guy Montgomery cracks me up – it’s time for bed. While I brush my teeth, my mind wanders to Donald Trump’s nightly hairstyling regimen, and I find myself wondering how he has time to do all that ranting and rallying and tweeting given the Maga mane he must tame each day. But I let it go, because it’s time to listen to the one thing that never fails to put me to sleep: Tim Walz’s homage to gutters on Instagram’s SubwayTakes. America’s new dad always gets it done.
Zzzzzzzz.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
