Good morning, RVA: 1,261↗️ • 8↘️; local elections; state elections; and national elections

Good morning, RVA! It’s 42 °F, and today looks a bit warmer than yesterday with highs near 70 °F. You should expect—as far as the weather goes—a pleasant day.

Water cooler

Richmond Polce are reporting that Marcellus Taylor was shot to death on the 2300 block of Phaup Street this past Monday afternoon. Taylor would be, I think, the 54th person murdered in 2020.

As of this morning, the Virginia Department of Health reports 1,261↗️ new positive cases of the coronavirus in the Commonwealth and 8↘️ new deaths as a result of the virus. VDH reports 113↗️ new cases in and around Richmond (Chesterfield: 41, Henrico: 50, and Richmond: 22). Since this pandemic began, 438 people have died in the Richmond region. As the State continues to post daily case counts over 1,000, if you have any reason to suspect you may have been exposed to the coronavirus, please go get tested. Today, from 2:00–4:00 PM, the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts will host a free community COVID-19 testing event at Second Baptist Church (3300 Broad Rock Boulevard). They’ll be doing drive-thru testing, but I hear that you won’t be turned away if you walk, roll, or ride up. You can also scroll through this big list of places to get tested on the VDH website. Lots of options!

Election results: There are none! We’ll, that’s not totally true, but races across the city, state, and country are either not finished counting mail-in ballots or are just too dang close to call.

First, this bit of process reported by the Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong should guide all of your local- and state-level election anxiety: Mail-in ballots are reported as part of “the central absentee precinct,” those votes were counted until 11:00 PM(ish) last night and then reported, counting will resume today but those results will not be posted until after 12:00 PM on Friday. So that plan of action, at least as of yesterday, leaves us waiting until Friday on…a lot of elections I care about.

Locally, who knows! The Department of Elections website has the partial results which do let us make some guesses. Roberto Roldan at VPM says total votes in the 2016 mayor’s race hit around 101,000, and that Department of Elections page I just linked to says we’re at 98,854 with, presumably, at least a handful of mail-in ballots left to count. For Richmond’s mayoral race, that gives us (or at least me, this morning) a double who knows, since Richmond’s Mayoral candidates must win five of the nine Council districts. With all of the mail-in ballots reporting in a single Central Absentee Precinct, how do we know which district they belong to? I think we’ll just have to wait to hear more Friday on this one, but, even though it doesn’t matter at all, Mayor Stoney leads the popular vote with 37%, followed by Councilmember Kim Gray with 26%, and Alexsis Rodgers with 27%. VPAP has a color-coded precinct mapthat’ll help you visualize where each candidate’s support comes from, but, remember, these are not final results. Also remember, that if a candidate fails to win five districts, we’ll have a runoff election later this year.

As for City Council, again, I don’t think we know a lot. It looks like Councilman Addison has a safe-ish lead in the 1st District; the 2nd is far too close to call (separated at the moment by seven total votes); the 3rd looks like it’ll come down to either Elaine Summerfield or Ann Lambert, but just a couple hundred votes separate them at the moment; I think Councilmember Lynch will retain her seat in the 5th; as will (probably!) incumbents Robertson and Newbille in the 6th and 7th. The 8th, where Candidate Amy Wentz has worked her tail off to unseat Councilmember Trammell, is too close to call, but the incumbent leads by 314 votes. So, at this point on Wednesday Morning, we don’t know who any of the new councilfolk will be. That makes me sad! As for School Board, more of the same, and Kenya Hunter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has those details (which are sure to change!).

At the state level, it looks like Amendment #1 passed, taking us a step towards fixing gerrymandering in Virginia. I think that’s something we know! Do we know if Representative Spanberger won her reelection bid against Nick Freitas, the guy who couldn’t remember to file the paperwork to get on the ballot…twice? We do not! Tom Lappas at the Henrico Citizensays Spanberger closed “a 50,000-vote gap by earning a 26,000-vote advantage among absentee voters in Henrico and a 24,000-vote advantage among those in Chesterfield.” Lappas says Freitas still leads by 273 votes as Spanberger waits on Spotsylvania County to report their absentee ballots. As seen in Henrico and Chesterfield as well as nationally, absentee ballots in this election have heavily favored democrats while in-person, day-of voting favored republicans.

While I’m writing this email, I’m also doomscrolling Twitter and watching the picture of the presidential election shift minute-by-minute. At the moment, and it literally changes every other moment, neither Trump nor Biden has won 270 electoral votes. I’ve been following the two Nates (FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and the NYT’s Nate Cohn), and it looks like Biden has a chance in: Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. All of these are too close to call, with, for example, Biden leading by less than 10,000 votes in Nevada. Remember! A lot of the outstanding votes are mail-in votes and, at least so far, a lot of those have broken heavily for democrats. Nate #2 says that, this far, absentee ballots in Pennsylvania have gone 78–21 for Biden. If you want to stress vomit, you can read FiveThirtyEights 2016-flashback-inducing, “Biden’s Favored In Our Final Presidential Forecast, But It’s A Fine Line Between A Landslide And A Nail-Biter” or you can stare at the NYT’s Georgia needle, willing it further left. Predictably, the 100% unknown results did not prevent Trump from taking to TV in the middle of the night to declare victory. News networks, staffed by reporters who’d been working hard since the previous day, were pissed. NBC even cut away from the speech before Trump could finish. Here’s what the NYT had to say: “No news organizations declared a winner between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and a number of closely contested states still had millions of mail-in ballots to count, in part because state and local Republican officials had insisted that they not be counted until Election Day. Mr. Trump said, without offering any explanation, that ‘we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,’ and added: ‘We want all voting to stop.’ No elected leader has the right to unilaterally order votes to stop being counted, and Mr. Trump’s middle-of-the-night proclamation amounted to a reckless attempt to hijack the electoral process as results in key battleground states were still not final, something without precedent in American politics.”

I’m sure there’s other news this morning, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe I’ll find some tomorrow! Until then, stay hydrated and get some rest.

This morning’s longread

Laundry is so easy. Why do we hate it so much?

Look, here’s a benign longread about laundry! Tap on the link and let your mind curl up in its totally inconsequential paragraphs as if they were a fresh pile of warm laundry lying on your bed, lit by the afternoon sun streaming through a window.

The problem with modern laundry is not that it is taxing, physically, but that it is hopeless, existentially. It is a constant losing battle, you and your gross body versus the steady march of decay. You wear clothes, and then you wash them, and in the absolute best-case scenario, you manage to erase the evidence that you were ever there. It will work until it doesn’t. Eventually, through time or user error, the fabrics will disintegrate. Someday, somewhere, you will do your final load. But the laundry will continue. It always does.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.