Shes writing out the price of soybeans.
She's writing out the price of soybeans. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
What's in store for us? Each week, we read our crystals, lick our palms, and divine the future. This week, it's our last chance to make totally unfounded but very trustworthy predictions about the 2020 general election. Let's get this party started.

Though Donald Trump loses the White House, this will not mean he stops those awful, super-spreading rallies. They will become something like church revivals during the winter years of Biden's presidency. He will hold them all over rural America, which will only consolidate his control of the GOP. Indeed, he will become the GOP. Trump will be the king of 60 million white voters. And in this way, his family (daughter, sons) will be princesses and princes of this virtual kingdom within American politics. C.M.

Twitter will ban Trump. Maybe it will come after we drag him out of the White House by his feet, or this week, when he claims victory before polling stations even close, but, eventually, Twitter will kick Trump off its platform. Twitter has pretended to fight Trump's rampant misinformation, lies, and incitement of terrorism by labeling his egregious tweets with warnings and alerts, but this nightmare will continue unabated until Twitter finally smashes that ban button. I think they'll gladly do it once Trump loses and then happily accept praise for a responsibility they should've upheld at least six years ago. Republicans will, of course, publicly whine that the banning violates free speech (it doesn't), but the smart ones will privately applaud the move. C.B.


Ernst and Graham will keep their Senate seats by the hairs on their chinny chin chins. Look, this thought breaks my heart as much as it breaks yours. There are few things I would love to see more than Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison kicking Sen. Lindsey Graham's behind up and down South Carolina. However. Polls show things ain't looking too hot for Harrison. Ditto up in Iowa, where Dem challenger Theresa Greenfield has put up a more than decent fight (and a fuckton of ca$h) against Republican incumbent and Trump-lover Joni Ernst. But both Harrison and Greenfield are running for seats in states that will likely go to Trump. The orange man is enjoying a 7.1 point lead in SC and is a slim 1.3 points ahead in IA. While literally anything could happen in the next 24 hours, I predict we'll live to see Graham in the Senate for yet another term. And we'll all be worse off for it. J.K.

But the Senate will get fucking flipped. I'm not saying this will be a comfortable or overwhelming victory for the Democrats, but if you believe—as I do—that Joseph R. Biden will win the presidency (knock on fuckin' wood), then I think the Dems can sweep up the three to four seats needed to boost them to a majority in the Senate. I'm mainly thinking about: Mark Kelly beating Martha McSally in Arizona; John Hickenlooper winning over Cory Gardner in Colorado; Cal Cunningham's wife-cheating-ass (no judgment) narrowly defeating Thom Tillis in North Carolina; Sara Gideon sending Susan Collins to retirement in Maine. Now if only it were that easy! J.K.

Voters will approve comprehensive sex ed, but that’ll be just the beginning. Referendum 90 will pass by a slim margin, despite the best efforts of a misinformation campaign claiming—ludicrously—that schools will teach sex positions to children. (Of course they won’t, come on.) But conservatives won’t want to admit defeat; instead, they’ll start looking for sneaky ways to slip their idea of age-appropriate instruction into schools. It won’t be easy for them since the state has established pretty specific guidelines and extensive oversight for sex ed material. But just as happened with abstinence-only education, expect to see religious groups pushing dubious TERFy material, or “purity” guest speakers who declare that a woman’s value is tied to her virginity. I’m old enough to remember when religious groups freaked out over books like Heather Has Two Mommies, and tried to get homophobic children’s books into libraries in the name of balance. Don’t let them pull the same trick with Washington’s excellent new sex ed instruction. M.B.

Jay Inslee will win, and another lockdown is on the way. Gov. Jay Inslee will win his record-breaking third term tonight. Sorry, Loren Culp. Shortly after that—maybe next Thursday?—Jay will shut down Washington again. Sorry, Loren Culp supporters. Cases around the country are rising. Washington reported 1,000 cases in a day just last Friday. The last time that happened was over the summer. Employers like King County announced last week that they wouldn't be going back to in-person work until next July. Clearly, nothing has improved. The only way to fight the virus is to go back to what we did in the spring. Inslee knows that. While reopening the economy was vital to secure his third term, now that he's won, I think we're in store for another lockdown. Welcome to March 2020 2.0. N.G.

The Peach State's gonna do it to 'em. If forced to choose a Biden upset in the "reach states" of Texas, Georgia, or Iowa, something inside me just knows Georgia's going to pick Biden. Some facts ground that airy feeling. Trump only won Georgia by five points in 2016. Demographics have been shifting since then. Stacey Abrams has been working since then. Biden's chances shot up in early October, and he now ties Trump in the polling averages, though the averages include two pollsters who handicap Trump for bullshit reasons. The state will vote on two high-profile U.S. Senate races that Democrats really want to win, which will drive turnout. Private polling shows Biden potentially up by double digits in ruby red suburbs. Biden closed out his campaign in Georgia, and people go where they're flattered. These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins, but mostly they're just feelings. R.S.

Proposition 1 will pass. Seattle’s Prop 1 will renew and slightly increase a tiny sales tax to help pay for transit—including services for low-income communities. It’ll pass because everyone (at least, everyone in Seattle) recognizes that times are tight, and slashing transit will only make things worse. But in the months that follow, expect some particularly tense budgetary squabbles as planners fight to make sure their projects get funded. This little revenue bump can get spent on a wide variety of expenditures, from implementing measures to blocking COVID-19 transmission to providing discounted rides to college students. There isn’t enough money for transit projects during the best of times; even though we can all agree that the measure should pass, there’s going to be plenty of conflict over exactly how it should be spent. My uneasy suspicion is that the West Seattle Bridge project will keep inflating until there’s barely any oxygen left for anything else. M.B.

We may predict the outcomes of many Washington state races sooner than usual. Ballot returns are up all over the state, and King County Elections told press on Monday that it expects to include approximately 1,000,000 ballots in Tuesday's results. That colossal drop is thanks to vast amounts of early voting and a great, proactive effort on King County Election's part. The county expects voters to return a total of about 1,300,000 ballots, so while tonight's drop obviously won't be definitive, we'll have a good sense of where many races are headed. Meanwhile, I expect we'll find out the battleground states' results maybe by, uh, let's say Hanukkah. C.B.

We'll see a red shift in Washington throughout election week. Normally, progressive voters wait until the last minute to vote in Washington, which means your insurgents can start out eight points behind on election night and wind up winning it all by the end of the week. But this cycle, political consultant Ben Anderstone argues that lots of hyper-engaged Democratic voters cast early ballots. So, the latecomers will probably actually end up being more conservative, which means your progressive insurgents might start stronger at the beginning of the week and then wind up losing to Kim Wyman by Friday. Judging by The Stranger's web traffic patterns on our endorsements this year, Anderstone's analysis tracks. R.S.

When Donald Trump realizes he is losing badly tonight, he will change his tune about this horrible business of counting votes forever. Expect him to say like it ain't no thing: We need to count every last vote and make sure each one is legit—this is how democracy works! Trump will, without thinking twice or feeling a twinge of contrition, do exactly what he accused others of planning to do and drag the counting process out further and further into the future. If we learned one thing over the past four years, it's the absence of a border between what Trump does and what he accuses others of doing. He can do one, one day; the next, the next day. I very well know I made this prediction not long before. I'm making it again because it's really going to happen. C.M.

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