More and more, I’m coming to believe the coronavirus is a conscious virus,  smarter than Dr. Fauci imagined, and is stalking our President as a punishment for his arrogance, ineptitude, and disregard for any human life other than his own.

It just won’t leave him alone. Every time he thinks he’s got it beat, it comes around from behind and bites him in the ass. It could be funny, but it isn’t.

In my fantasy – I have written fiction –  the virus appears initially to give him a chance to learn leadership and grow as a President. It was traveling around the world, testing and playing with leaders and governments.

Trump blew it off – nothing could get in the way of his re-election – so it decided to teach him the lesson it has been teaching many other smug and foolish countries.

It raced across the United States,  crippled his precious economy, and gave the Democrats a miraculous issue to campaign on. The virus still had some hope that he would wake up. He didn’t.

He said the virus was a hoax, another Democratic and fake news, and elitist plot to make him look bad and defeat him in November. The virus could hardly believe it when the President of the United States suggested drinking Chlorox as a cure. How insulting.

So the virus sailed right through the most protected building on the earth and wound it’s way into the White House and infected him and his family.

For a day or two, he got very sick. But his life was spared miraculously in the hope that he had learned his lesson and would fight to keep others from getting sick and dying.

The lesson he learned, he said, was that he was tough, and the virus was no big deal and would soon go away. Masks, he insists, were for sissies like Joe Biden.

A normal leader would have gotten the message, but President Trump thinks he is smarter and tougher than the pandemic, which really seems to have pissed the virus off. He keeps having trouble with strong women.

She is slapping him up and downside the head and flipping him up in the air like a dog with a hedgehog. Since we screwed it up, she decided to change the country all by herself.

Cults have this Kool-Aid – remember Jim Jones – thing, and his supporters came out to cheer him on by the tens of thousands, happy to catch the virus if it supported their leader and pleased him. They called it the Superspreader Campaign.

(Sometimes we all have to make sacrifices for the good of our country.)

But Donald Trump doesn’t learn lessons, so getting him sick failed.  By now, the pandemic was steamed and getting frustrated. What would she have to do to get his attention and respect?

She responded by sickening his closest aides and a bunch of his followers and humiliating him.

That didn’t work either, so the infection came up with something even more diabolical. It decided to strike record numbers of new people in every battleground state he desperately needs to win.

Even as Air Force One pulled up to his rallies, local hospitals were filling up with sick people, and newspaper headlines were all about COVID-19, not him. Boy, the virus knows how to hurt.

COVID-19 is also picking off selected MAGA fans who brave crowds and cold and heat and sickness to buy campaign shirts and hats and shout Mussolini style threats to jail his opponents.

It’s new role – following the President into key battleground states in the final days of the election to remind the sane and the rationale that it is real and that he is still unwilling to respect it or deal with it.

That worked a bit. At one rally Thursday, he said it might not be a bad idea to wear masks if “you get close to people.” Not good enough, I fear.

I wish he would learn his lesson, however late. God knows what she will do next. Maybe she will decide to save our country from him and her both.

It sounds bizarre until you think about it. The moral is don’t piss off or dismiss COVID-19. It’s listening.

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I was interested in reading that Americans are more excited about this election than any other recorded polling history election. Nine-four percent of registered voters told an Economist poll this week that voting for president this year is “very important.”

For all the sturm and drang about this election, that is good news for any democracy. The number of voters who said they are more excited to vote than usual is 15 percentage points higher among Republicans and 27 points higher among Democrats than four years ago.

The share of  Democrats who say they’re more enthusiastic about voting this year is about nine percentage points higher than the Republicans’ share who say the same.

The polls have remained steady all week. Pennsylvania is the focus of attention now; the contest is close with most polls showing Biden with a small lead, anywhere between four and eight points.

Pennsylvania is important.

It looks as if the Democrats will take control of the Senate.

Does Trump still have a chance to win the election? Here are the odds according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.

“We’re now less than five days away from Election Day, and Joe Biden leads in both national and state polls. At this point, President Trump needs a big polling error in his favor if he’s going to win. Although if you were just looking at national polls, the error doesn’t need to be as big as you might think. Take Pennsylvania, the state our forecast currently thinks is most likely to decide the election. Biden doesn’t have much extra cushion in polls there, so a 2016 magnitude polling error could deliver the state to Trump. Remember, Trump has a meaningful chance of winning the election, per our forecast — a little worse than the chances of rolling a 1 on a six-sided die and a little better than the chances that it’s raining in downtown Los Angeles.”

Biden is ahead in Wisconsin,  Georgia, and North Carolina, which would signal a seismic shift in the Southeast. He is close in Texas, but most seasoned political analysts think Trump will win one of the most conservative states.

Biden is also ahead in Florida, a key state for both candidates, but the margin is too narrow to be certain. Florida election counts are messy and chaotic.

As of today, Biden is favored to win the election. FiveThirtyEight simulates the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often. The sample of 100 outcomes below offers a good idea of the range of scenarios their model believes possible:

Trump wins 11 in 100. Biden wins 89 in 100.

Despite the President’s inaccurate rambling about it, one thing to remember is that national federal elections are often not resolved for a day or more after an Election. It is unlikely we will know who won for several days.

Trump is sure to challenge any unfavorable election result, but if Biden wins and his victory margin is as large as it appears to be now, Trump can’t prevail.

At this point, I would recommend choosing one news source that you trust and listening to it once in the morning and once in the early evening—no news after 7 p.m. for me, time to transition to rest and peace.

Partisans on both sides and the journalists who cover them will get increasingly shrill and hysterical over the next four days. We don’t have to jump up and down with them.

I strongly urge anyone with anxiety issues to stay off of social media. It’s a cesspool out there in normal times; it’s gone nuclear now. My rule is that I never argue my beliefs or opinions on social media, ever. My opinions are my own; they don’t need the approval of others or their condemnation.

Somehow, people on social media have gotten the idea that everybody else wants to know what they think. Opinions have a right to life on their own.

I’ve seen nothing to make me believe there is an upset coming, although anything is possible. The Biden campaign seems confident, well-organized, and taking nothing for granted.

The Trump campaign is in chaos between money troubles, virus outbreaks, a lunatic candidate, and the fact that every swing state is experiencing record or near-record increases in coronavirus infections. At the same time, Trump travels the country, infecting as many people as possible, a novel way of showing his leadership skills.

That’ll show all those pansies with masks.

Trump was mired in 2016, and he believes what worked for him then will work for him now. This is yet another chance to see if science can do better than superstition.

I read the polls, and the new ones are absolutely nothing like the ones in 2016 in terms of detail, reach, and back-stopping.