Nauseously Optimistic
Joe Zeigler, Burnt Ground, Sunday, November 1, 2026
The Sunday post on Burnt Ground is paid. Not this one. This is not the week to charge for the idea of democracy. It is the week to spread what hope I have and to hope out loud for decency after so much indecency. Do not read this as a gift from me. It is a sharing of my hope.
I have been voting in midterms since Richard Nixon was president, and I have never gone into one feeling the way I do this Sunday. Hopeful. And sick about it.
The hope is easy to explain. More than 43 million people have already voted. Texas, which does not register voters by party, has already received 6.3 million early ballots, against 4.2 million at the same point four years ago. Democrats lead the national polls. Wall Street, which bets on outcomes rather than wishes, has priced in a Democratic House and is hedging on the Senate. Trump is spending the last weekend flying between Daytona Beach, Kansas, and Iowa, promising a space academy to Ohio if Ohio behaves. A president who thinks he is winning does not spend the final weekend in Kansas.
The nausea takes longer.
Look at what got filed this week while the ballots were coming in.
In Alaska, the Justice Department has sued to block certification of the Senate race if the Republican loses narrowly. Not after the count. Before it. The lawsuit sits on a docket right now, waiting for a number it does not like.
In Texas, a county Republican party has sued to block certification of results unless every ballot in the state gets counted by hand. Not their county. The state. Every ballot. The demand is built to be impossible so that failing it becomes the reason for whatever comes next.
In California, Bill Essayli, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, and agents from Homeland Security Investigations have served federal criminal grand jury subpoenas on at least four county election workers. One landed Thursday, the day after Judge David Carter refused the department's demand that California set aside some 20,000 mail ballots from voters the administration calls "likely" noncitizens. The subpoenas ask the workers for their internal communications about the Justice Department's own demands and for anything that tends to show a noncitizen voted or that someone helped one. Carter wrote that the department's conduct, taken together, amounts to a broad and ongoing pattern of attempted federal election interference. He said from the bench that threats against county election employees should stop immediately. A sitting federal judge stated that the subpoena was issued four days before a national election, despite the timing. Dean Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar, said threats and intimidation have no place in elections. He is right, and it changes nothing.
Two people close to the White House told MS NOW the department will certainly file more suits in other states once the counting starts. Washington State has already been threatened over its mail ballots. And one Trump ally summed up the plan in four words that belong over the door of the Justice Department: "whether there's fraud or not."
Read that again. The people filing the paper are telling you fraud is not the point. The result is the point. If the result is wrong, fraud will be found, or asserted, or invented, and the finding will not depend on anything that happens inside a ballot box.
That is the nausea. Every number that makes me hopeful is the trigger. The early vote is not a safety margin. It is the thing the Alaska suit is waiting for. The Texas county is not confused about hand counting. It wants a reason. The California subpoenas are not an investigation into 20,000 voters. They are a warning to a few thousand clerks: count carefully, and remember who holds the grand jury.
In 2020 the lie came after the count. Trump lost, said he had won, and then went looking for lawyers and a mob. The machinery was improvised, and because it was improvised, it failed. Judges threw it out of 60 courtrooms. A vice president with a spine the size of a pencil found the pencil. This time the machinery is not improvised. The lawyers are federal employees. The subpoenas are signed. The contest is filed before the vote, so that on Wednesday morning nobody has to decide anything. The decision is already in the drawer.
I wrote two weeks ago about the 61 days between November 3 and January 3, when the new Congress sits. I called that the dangerous window. I was half right. The window is still dangerous, but the fuse is already lighted inside it. What we are watching this week is the slow burn from the match to the charge.
Here is what makes it hard to write about. None of this is secret. The Alaska filing is public. The Texas filing is public. Carter's ruling runs 33 pages, and anyone can read it. Reporters have all of it, and the coverage treats each item as one more midterm story, filed next to the late ad buys and the Cheesecake Factory feud. The polls get the headline. The horse race gets the graphic. And we measure the lead like a crowd watching a man pour gasoline while arguing about how nice the house looks.
I am 80. I was raised Republican in a party that lost elections and said so. Goldwater lost and went home. Nixon lost in 1960 to Cook County and did not demand a grand jury for the clerks. Whatever else those men were, they believed the count was the count. The party that carries their name now sends federal agents to election workers with grand jury paper in hand and says, with a straight face, that it is protecting the vote.
So yes, I am optimistic. The numbers are good. The country, or enough of it, has noticed. If the votes are counted the way this country has counted votes for more than two centuries, Tuesday goes badly for PrumpTutin and his Congress. I believe that.
And that belief is exactly what nauseates me. The man and his department have clearly stated, in filings and in four simple words, what they plan to do if my assessment is correct.
Vote anyway. Vote as if the count will hold, because it might, and because a stolen election is worse than one nobody tried to win. Then watch the drawer. The paper is already in it.
Also from Burnt Ground
Two Weeks. The Justice Department tells California's ballot counters they can be prosecuted, 14 days before the vote.
The Man Who Would Cancel November. Written in February. The Fulton County seizure, the gutted election-security offices, the agents at the polls.
The Ladder. The excuses, written down 37 days out, so nobody can say they were improvised.
Until Confidence Is Restored. The speech an electoral commission chairman gives when the count stops.
The Mechanics of the Panic. How the fortress was built and what broke it.
Watch the Hands. The military purge, and what it is for.
My books, from Arrakis Publishing
PrumpTutin. How Trump sold the West. The one organism, named.
The Art of the Lie. The lie as method, from the escalator to the count.
We Used to Be Wise. The accounting of what the United States knew and set down.
1776: A Novel. Caleb Doyle watches the founding the schoolbooks skipped, including the parts about counting.