Worse than it should be, not as bad as you think

First off, obviously it's disappointing that the election didn't yield the fast and clear-cut result we hoped for.  The failure to unambiguously repudiate the most corrupt, malignant, and incompetent president in US history tells us some disturbing things about the country -- the Trumpanzees and people willing to tolerate Trump's attacks on democracy for the sake of policies they prefer, while still a minority, are a larger minority than we thought.  The polls in many cases appear to have been further off the mark than in 2016, despite pollsters' claims that they had fixed the problems that led to their errors that year.  We'd be fools ever to trust them again for future elections.

That being said, the odds are still good that Biden wins eventually, assuming vote-counting proceeds as normal.  He's well ahead in Arizona and has moved into a narrow lead in Wisconsin.  The number of ballots left to count in Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and (to a lesser extent) Pennsylvania and Georgia, and the preponderance of early votes among them, give him a better than even chance of winning some or all of those states.  Maine and North Carolina look like they could go either way.  His odds of winning the Electoral College are still better than Trump's.  He's also ahead in the popular vote among votes counted, 69.1 million to 66.8 million (and no, despite some reports, there are not 300,000 ballots sitting in limbo in the postal system).  Who gets the Senate majority is impossible to predict at this point, and may end up depending on run-offs in Georgia later in the year.

Trump has already declared his intent to get the vote-counting stopped in the states where it is still going on.  Under normal conditions, such a request would be laughed out of court.  This is not like the Florida situation in 2000, where the Supreme Court stopped recounts in a state that was effectively a 50-50 tie.  This would mean refusing to count valid ballots cast on time, which simply hadn't been counted yet because officials hadn't gotten around to them yet.

The question, then, is whether Trump has sufficiently corrupted the courts that he can get one to issue an injunction to stop further counting when there is clearly no legal basis for doing so -- and whether the Supreme Court itself would back this up when Democrats appealed it there.  If that were to happen, the further question is whether the states which are still counting ballots would obey such an obviously baseless ruling.  If they did, it is possible that Trump could steal the election.

But that would be unambiguously stealing the election, by refusing to count votes legally cast, a very different matter from the Republicans' usual use of gimmicks to prevent votes from being cast in the first place.  It would be an explicit abandonment of democracy.  If it were to happen, there would be a real question as to whether the blue states and cities, the powerhouses of the economy, would feel obligated to recognize a flagrantly-illegitimate regime.  Even some institutions of the federal government might refuse to recognize Trump as legally president.  I think the Supreme Court, even given its current make-up, is unlikely to put its imprimatur on a such crude coup d'état with such massive potential repercussions, based on nothing more than Trump's say-so.

So Biden will probably win the presidency in the end.  Of course, if we don't get the Senate majority, the Democrats' ability to carry out necessary reforms and repair the damage Trump has done will be limited.  We will have another chance in 2022, when Republicans will be defending more vulnerable Senate seats than Democrats will, but two more years of Moscow Mitch retaining his power to obstruct will do undeniable damage.

There were a few positives downballot on cultural issues -- Oregon and DC legalized psilocybin mushrooms, and Oregon also decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard street drugs.  New Jersey and Arizona passed marijuana legalization measures.

If Trump loses, I'm not all that worried about violence from armed Trumpanzees.  Yes, there will be isolated cases of mayhem and murder, similar to what we've already seen over the last few months, but not anything on a large enough scale to have a political impact.  They're too inept and disorganized.  (The same applies to violence from left-wing fringe elements if Trump wins.)

In short, it will take several more days to learn definitively who has won the presidency, and perhaps longer to be sure who has the Senate majority.  But we've known all along that that was a real possibility.  What we've seen so far is grounds for disappointment, but not for losing hope.