President-Elect Joe Biden has been making lots of news with his slow rollout of nominees for various cabinet choices, top advisors, czars, and agency heads. So far, Team Biden has taken a very systematic approach, choosing one or two main areas each week (such as pandemic response or the economy), and then rolling out entire teams of top advisors all at once. This helps the media and the public keep their focus on individual areas of responsibility, and as a result it gives all the Biden picks lots of good press (for being so gradual and comprehensible).

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That headline is meant as a joke, because the much-more-typical headline of its type (that lazy political writers love to use) is: "Democrats In Disarray." But this week the Trump circus is finally beginning to realize that it's almost time to fold its tents and leave town, and the result has been the party beginning to eat its own, as it tries to figure out how to cope with the looming post-Trump era.

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This isn't just the Keystone Kops, it's now a full-on Keystone Koup attempt. Before we get to any of it, however, we have to pause to wish Joseph Robinette Biden Junior a happy 78th birthday. Many happy returns, Joe!

Biden is now several steps closer to being sworn in as America's next president in less than nine weeks, as state after state certifies that Biden did indeed beat Donald Trump. Georgia did so today, and several other important states are slated to do so on Monday. By December 8th, all states will have done so and appointed their electors to the Electoral College.

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President Donald Trump is the lamest of lame ducks right now. He is so lost in his fantasy that he somehow didn't lose the election to Joe Biden that he has almost completely stopped even any pretense of doing his job. He rouses himself out of his funk to occasionally fire someone who has annoyed him in some way, but that's about it, really. Otherwise his time is consumed by all the sour grapes served up at his giant pity party.

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President Donald Trump has spent the past two weeks tweeting from his basement. If you ignore these tweets, he hasn't done much of anything else at all for that entire period of time. He laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for Veterans Day, and he gave a very halfhearted announcement on the progress of the vaccine trials... and he's also played a lot of golf. So much golf. But you know what? Trump golfing or sulking in the basement is actually a lot better than Trump in a fit of rage, trampling things all over the place like a deranged Godzilla.

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Let me be clear from the start -- that headline is not meant to be metaphorical in any way. And I'm not even being figurative or quasi-metaphorical, in the "I get sick to my stomach when I think about politics" sort of way. Also, this title does not refer to the presidential election or what's going on in Washington at all. Sadly enough, that headline is meant to be taken completely literally. Because politics is sickening people across the country, period. On average, the chances of you catching COVID-19 are now clearly greater if you live in a red state than if you live in a blue state.

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Here we are, the end of a very long and exhausting road. Election Day is tomorrow. But 100 million Americans may have already voted before Tuesday even dawns. Voting in the time of COVID-19 has been just as different as everything else we've been living through.

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In 1973, baseball legend Yogi Berra uttered the immortal line: "It ain't over 'til it's over." He was speaking about the playoffs, but it's really a universal statement that has particular relevance right now. Because tens of millions of Americans just want the election to be over. Many have wanted this for months. And we've still got five more days to go.

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So it has come down to this. Do you want to live in a fantasy world for the next four years, or would you prefer reality? President Donald Trump's White House science office put out a press release today that should really go down in history right next to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner. It lists Trump's accomplishments while in office, and prominently features the statement that Trump is responsible for "ending the COVID-19 pandemic."

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Welcome to our penultimate Electoral Math column. Next Monday, I will post my own final picks for the 2020 presidential election, for better or for worse. And I promise, in the final column, there will be no tossup states at all -- I'll make a prediction even for those I've got to flip a coin to decide.

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