Election Day 2018

Ken AshfordElection 2018Leave a Comment

This post will be a hodgepodge of happenings around the country (and locally) as Election Day goes forward.  I won’t be monitoring the results in real time as I have things going on this evening, but I may update late tonight. We’ll see.

Early voting is high, surpassing the last midterm election in 2014 in most states. Indications this morning also indicate high turnout.

Let me start off with something local. 

Good to know. There doesn’t appear to be serious shenanigans anywhere so far although Facebook caught the Russians at it again last night:

Acting on a tip from law enforcement, Facebook has removed more than 100 accounts – 30 on Facebook, 85 on Instagram – engaging in coordinated activity in French, English and Russian, raising the possibility that foreign actors are attempting to meddle on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections.

Facebook said it was alerted Sunday night to the suspicious activity that law enforcement believe may be linked to foreign entities and blocked the accounts in question. Almost all the Facebook pages appear to be in French or Russian while the Instagram accounts were mostly in English. Some were focused on celebrities, others on political debate, Facebook said. 

“Typically, we would be further along with our analysis before announcing anything publicly. But given that we are only one day away from important elections in the U.S., we wanted to let people know about the action we’ve taken and the facts as we know them today,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a blog post. “Once we know more – including whether these accounts are linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency or other foreign entities – we will update this post.”

Oh, and Fox News completed its merger with the White House last night. Here is Sean Monday afternoon versus Monday evening.

He even had the gall to point to the media in the convention center (including Fox News) and call them “fake news”

Moving on…. good things abound locally

GOTV is big everywhere today on social media

Uh oh….

By the way, there is no doubt that this election is a referendum on Trump, if for no other reason than he MADE it that way by doing extremely heavy campaigning.  Rather than campaigning on the economy, Trump chose to focus on immigration (the migrant caravan, birthright citizenship) and Dem-bashing, rather than his accomplishments. Did it help? We’ll find out. It was red meat to his base, but his base may not be what it was two years ago.  Also, it energized Democrats too.

More Hannity fallout….

Long lines and interesting solutions….