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It’s Election Day, which can only mean one thing: Bad pre-elections are on the way out, and bad job-The elections are almost upon us. We’re planning fifteen such shots that, if the story is to be believed, you might hear sleep-deprived reporters and pundits echoing cable news or tapping X tomorrow — or whenever that the result will ultimately be announced – depending on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins. and all the procedural shenanigans.

If Harris wins:

“Sources close to Trump say his mood is dark but defiant; he checks the links and talks on the phone with friends and advisors about his next moves.
The reporting on “Trump’s mood” is from 2017, and his defiance must at this point be assumed.

“This is the end of Trump’s political career.” (See also: “Our long national nightmare is over.”)
It wasn’t the last time, and it won’t be this time.

“Trump’s defeat will finally trigger serious reckoning within the Republican Party.” (See also: “The battle for the soul of the Republican Party has only just begun.”)
This actually happened after January 6, 2021, for about five minutes. Otherwise, Trump completely owns the modern Republican Party, and there’s no reason to think that will change anytime soon.

“Now it’s up to Kamala Harris to keep her campaign promise and unite America.” (See also: “Why hasn’t Harris yet said which Republican she will appoint to her Cabinet?” and “Kamala Harris should help the country heal by dropping federal charges against Trump and granting him a pardon for any crime committed or committed outside of office).
Replace Harris’ name with Joe Biden, and this feeling was commonly expressed in the aftermath of the 2020 elections. But as we wrote at the timea president cannot impose unity on opponents who refuse to unite. (Also: promoting “unity” does not require a president to always agree with his opponents on every policy, or to place them in his cabinet.)

“Why isn’t Kamala Harris doing more interviews?”
Expect to hear this if Harris doesn’t make sitting down with Dana Bash a post-election priority during the first week.

If Trump wins:

“Kamala Harris should have done more interviews!”
There was a time when it was true. Since then, she has done numerous interviews.

“Kamala Harris has failed to define herself.”
There may be a legitimate criticism lurking somewhere here, but at this point it’s mostly just a lazy, hackneyed cliché about Harris…one that the media themselves helped to reinforce.

“JD Vance was a brilliant choice for vice president, even though the media made fun of him.”
He had consistently high unfavorable ratings; Besides, the choice of vice president doesn’t matter much. Vance was chosen to clash with the mediaand that’s what he did.

“In the end, no one cared about Trump’s threats to democracy or January 6.”
Many people care about Trump’s threats to democracy and January 6th.

“That was President-elect Donald Trump speaking there, pledging to be a president for all Americans and striking, at least for now, a much more presidential tone.”
If I can promise you that you’ll actually hear one of these bad takes, it’ll be this one.

Whoever wins:

“(A minor event X) and/or (a supposedly monolithic demographic group Y) proved decisive in this election. »
Biden (supposedly) calls Trump supporters trash? No. Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney? No either. America is a complicated country and this will be a complicated and close election; even if a certain event or demographic seems to have made a difference in the outcome, it certainly won’t have done so in a vacuum or against a static baseline.

“Once again we see a nation hopelessly divided between two competing realities. » (See also: something about a Rorschach test.)
It’s time to retire this shot and think more about how it happened and what it means.

“The polls and/or probability models were wrong. »
Okay, that might well be true, but there’s nothing easier than bashing the polls before a proper autopsy has been done on their real strengths and weaknesses. (Polls were quickly condemned in 2016 for example, but were actually pretty good in retrospect.) And experts have often misunderstood the value of polls – and their much-maligned cousin, probabilistic models – and what they do and do not purport to show, a particularly dangerous pitfall in a race to the margins of error. Ultimately, no one can predict the future.

If the counting takes several days:

“(Candidate X) catches up with (candidate Y) in (swing state Z). »
In 2020, cable networks used this kind of dynamic language (Biden is in the “fastest car”) to describe fluctuating totals as votes are counted. This was understandable but, as we wrote at the time, it inadvertently reinforced Trump’s claims that the results were somehow being changed in real time, rather than reflecting the delay in reporting data set by the ballot deadline in each state. The situation this year could be more complicated than Biden’s faster car due to a seemingly less clear partisan divide between early and election day voting – a welcome opportunity to do away with this type of coverage altogether.

If Trump refuses to accept the result:

“Trump seeks to overturn the result.”
It’s not Lord of the Rings.

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has been published in the New York Review of Books, The New YorkerAnd The Atlanticamong other points of sale. He writes the CJR newsletter The media today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.