There's a dude in Erie County, Ohio named probably Dave, who woke up Tuesday, looked at his phone, and decided the country's future based on who cut him off in traffic.
We're all just riding shotgun in Dave's mood.
With the election basically a coin toss right now, both campaigns have entered the final phase of American democracy: begging strangers in diners to please, please care.
Kamala Harris is doing rallies with celebrities who haven't been relevant since 2009, and Donald Trump is doing rallies that are less campaign events and more extended therapy sessions with a crowd.
The polls are, as always, completely useless.
A third says the margin of error is so wide it might as well be a weather forecast.
Somewhere a data analyst is crying into a spreadsheet and honestly, fair.
The real battlegrounds are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina — also known as the seven states that get to decide everything while the rest of us just watch like it's the Super Bowl but with higher stakes and worse halftime shows.
Both sides are dumping money into ads that all sound the same: ominous music, grainy footage of the other guy, and a narrator who sounds like he's reading a hostage note.
You could swap the candidates' names and nobody would notice for at least thirty seconds.
Early voting is already breaking records, which is either inspiring or terrifying depending on how many of those ballots are from people who think the moon landing was faked.
Democracy is also a group project where half the class didn't do the reading.
Trump is promising to fix everything on day one, which is adorable given that day one historically involves a parade and a bunch of pens.
Harris is promising to turn the page, which is a nice sentiment if we hadn't already read this book six times.
A few undecided voters in a focus group said they were "still weighing their options," which is political speak for "I will decide in the parking lot of my polling place based on vibes." Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to survive the onslaught of texts from unknown numbers asking if we've made a plan to vote.
Yes, Karen, my plan is to vote and then aggressively ignore politics for three years until this happens again.
Not the pundits, not the consultants, not the guy on cable news who's been wrong since 2016 but still gets paid to yell.
We're all just guessing and pretending it's analysis.
So here we are, days out, waiting on Dave from Ohio and about six other people in a diner in Scranton to make the call.
May God have mercy on us all, because the electoral college sure as hell won't.
In conclusion, this election is a mess, the system is held together by duct tape and caffeine, and we'll all pretend the outcome was obvious the whole time.
Final Thoughts
It's going to be a long week of refreshing results pages at 2 a.m.