Discussion Thread: Election Dread

I don't know about you, but I am starting to get a real case of Election Dread, going into the start of the 2020 presidential election season.

Primarily, I'm dreading witnessing all the evidence that our elections will be neither free nor fair, between foreign interference, Republican voter suppression efforts, inaccessibility of voting, gerrymandering, hacking, and everything else that conspires to undermine our democracy.

It hits me in the gut, hard, every time I think about how indescribably important this election will be, and how unlikely it is to have anything resembling meaningful election integrity or a legitimate outcome.

I'm also dreading the fights that we'll have to navigate between now and Election Day. The vanity candidates and their catastrophic egos. The purity leftists. The wannabe spoilers. The obvious Kremlin agents. The bots. The trolls. The ratfuckers.

I am steeling myself for massive campaigns of vicious misogyny and racism and homophobia that will be waged against many of the Democratic candidates. And for the relentless campaigns of harassment and misogyny and fat hatred and will be waged against me for defending them.

And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm dreading it all. And there's nothing I can do about it, except wait.

But I figured I'm not alone, and that it might help just to express this dread. To take it out and look at it together. To remember that we're not in this alone.

So if you're feeling that creeping election dread, too, here's a place for discussion.