They’ll tell you.

When you talk to American voters – and this writer recently has, hundreds of times, from New Hampshire to Florida to California – you’ll be told three things, a lot.

Young to old, East to West, Right to Left, three themes emerge. It’s pretty consistent.

One, they voted early.

We Democratic Party volunteers made lots of calls to lots Americans who had picked up an absentee ballot down at the town hall, or who had voted early. Many, many Americans chose to vote this way.

By the final weekend, more than 90 million Americans had voted in advance. That’s 70 per cent of the total number of all voters in 2016. And that doesn’t merely break records – it is extraordinary. It is unprecedented.

And that kind of early turnout is never, ever good for the incumbent.

In the so-called battleground states – the ones whose electoral college votes will determine who gets to be president, and which party controls Congress – more than half of the number who voted in 2016 did so early in 2020. Those states include Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, Maine, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Nebraska.

States that Donald Trump dominated in last time. States he desperately needs to keep to win re-election.

Democratic Party volunteers weren’t trained to inquire why people voted early. But the subject would sometimes come up. Some would tell us they were anxious about catching the virus, and early voting seemed a lot safer.

But some would say they feared that Donald Trump would try and prevent Democrats from voting. That he’d scheme to suppress the vote.

“I already voted Democrat up and down the ticket,” one New Hampshire man said to me. “No dirty tricks. We need to get rid of Trump.”

And that points to another thing we discovered when talking to American voters: very, very few were undecided.

They had their minds made up, and long ago, too. The undecided vote – the “gettable” vote, which is really all that matters in most elections, in the United States or any other Western democracy – was smaller in 2020 than ever before.

Some political scientists call this group “volatile voters” – electors whose allegiance moves around, and who tend to be unenthusiastic about their political choices in every election. In 2016, about 20 per cent of likely voters were undecided (or volatile).

In 2020, it’s less than half that number. In some states, it’s has been as little as five per cent.

Why so small? Because these voters aren’t undecided anymore. They’ve made their mind up: a New York Times/Siena poll released this week found that 54 per cent of volatile/undecided voters had an unfavorable view of Trump. He has become the ballot question.

It’s pretty hard to win re-election in 2020 when, like Trump, you’ve lost the undecideds – the ones who overwhelmingly broke your way in 2016. Because Trump was considered the lesser of two evils last time.

Not this time. On the phone, over and over, those we contacted rarely said they were undecided. When they were prepared to say how they voted, or how they would vote, they were clear: they were going Democrat, up and down the ticket.

They were doing that, they said, because they wanted Trump out, period. Not because they were seized with a burning love for Joe Biden.

“Go get Trump, honey,” Bessie, a Florida voter, said to me. “Keep doing what you’re doing and get him out!”

And, by any objective measurement, Donald Trump should be thrown out. In poll after poll, in every electoral college analysis – in every phone call we Democratic volunteers made to every eligible voter we could find – we found highly-motivated, clearly-decided voters who want Trump gone.

That, then, is the third and final reason he should lose: Americans are sick of him. They are sick of his face.

He used Twitter to be on their devices, 24/7. He used the White House as a reality-show stage. He used the presidency as a prop. He was ubiquitous – the most-seen, most-read, most-discussed President in the history of the United States of America.

And, somewhere along the way, Americans – including lots of undecideds and not a few Republicans – just got fed up. He had exhausted them. He had been a psychodrama without end.

So, now, they want it to end. That was the third thing we learned: American voters have had their lives disrupted quite enough, thank you very much.

Economically, socially, culturally, the pandemic has disrupted everything. They don’t need a disruptor in the White House, too.

That’s the third thing, the determining factor. They want things to calm down, a bit. They want normal again. They want their lives back. They want Joe Biden is selling: peace and quiet.

Unless he figures out some way to cheat his way back into office – aided and abetted by the courts he’s stacked for four years – Donald Trump is a goner. He’s toast.

And that’s not just because the polls and the pundits say so.

That’s what Americans are saying. You just have to pick up the phone and call them.

They’ll tell you.

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Yesterday was a really really good day. I won’t bore you with the details, but I went to bed feeling pretty good.

As I usually do, I took a peek at social media. On Twitter, in direct messages, a man – I’ll just call him Dean – had sent me a note asking if I was serious about helping people who are in trouble. I said yes.

He was in Calgary (I already knew that, from previous interactions I’ve had with him about politics) and at a well-known Calgary hotel on the 10th floor. He told me he had broken the window and thrown everything in the suite onto the ground below. He said the police were there, outside the room.

I didn’t know whether to believe him. But I asked him to remain cool and stay in contact with me. He sent me a photo showing that he had indeed broken a window and was sitting on the windowsill, ten floors up.

I kept him engaging with me, but then I got in touch with the Calgary police service. I told them what was happening, and started coordinating responses with them.

A couple times Dean said to me things like “over and out,” and indicating finality. I kept him talking as much as I could. I was scared for him.

(For reasons known only to themselves, Twitter summarily took down his account during all this, thereby ending my ability to engage with Dean. I’m not sure why they do things like that, but it was not very frigging helpful. Fortunately I had a couple phone numbers he had given me.)

Dean’s back-and-forth with me, and with the police, went on for a while. It was clear that he felt he was out of options and unloved. Eventually, however, he surrendered to police and one of their psychologists sent me the message quoted here.

This is all I said to him, and probably the only thing of value I said to him. It is true of him, and it is true of every one of you who experiences what he did, or will experience it in the hard months ahead. Remember it. I believe it.

You are loved.

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An anniversary happened last week. You can be forgiven for missing it.

That’s because no one really celebrated it.

The Canadian federal general election happened on October 21, 2019. It resulted in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party getting re-elected. It was in all the papers.

Except the first anniversary of Trudeau’s re-election really wasn’t – in the papers, or a victory. Postmedia and CBC published a couple stories, true, in which a couple Paul Martin acolytes were interviewed.

And, to be sure: if you’re writing a story about how to take a perfectly good Parliamentary majority and turn it into a minority or a loss, those are indeed the guys to consult: they are the undisputed experts in wrecking Liberal parties, and losing power.

But the anniversary of the October 2019 election? No one really noticed, or cared. The reason was simple: with a single notable exception, every federal Canadian political party – every federal leader – lost something. They didn’t win.

Justin Trudeau, for example, may have been returned to power. But he lost plenty.

He lost a comfortable Parliamentary majority, and was reduced to a minority, one that the Opposition parties can combine to remove from government. While still clinging to power, Trudeau’s share of the popular vote is puny – just 33 per cent.

Trudeau actually received a lot fewer votes than the Conservative Party. And it was the first time in history that a Canadian political party has formed a government with so little of the popular vote.

It’s not just a numbers game, either. By losing his majority, Trudeau lost control of some powerful House of Commons committees. (And that is why he actually threatened to force an election last week – to prevent the creation of a new committee that would have the authority to subpoena witnesses and documents in the never-ending WE scandal, which has implicated Trudeau and his family.)

Trudeau lost something else in the October 2019 election, too: his reputation. When it was revealed that the Liberal leader wore racist blackface at least three times, he shocked Canadians, and became a figure of ridicule and derision around the world.

And it’s not forgotten, either: just this week, satirist Sacha Baron Cohen savagely mocked Trudeau in his hit Borat movie sequel, showing the Canadian Prime Minister wearing blackface while a teacher at a Vancouver school.

The Conservatives and their former leader lost plenty, too. The Tories were shut out of Canadian cities, and shunned by Canadian women or youth. Despite Trudeau’s myriad scandals – including blackface, which literally broke while the election campaign was underway – the Conservative campaign was disjointed, incoherent and poorly-managed.

Its then-leader, Andrew Scheer, distinguished himself as a remarkably unremarkable politician – and one who couldn’t score on an open net, even on a breakaway.

The New Democrats lost, as well. When the election was called, Jagmeet Singh’s party had nearly 40 seats. When it ended, Singh had lost almost half of them. His share of the popular vote plummeted.

In the intervening year, Singh has further diminished his party by cravenly propping up Justin Trudeau’s government – simply because Singh and his NDP lack the money, and the strength, to fight another election. His New Democrats have handed Trudeau a majority in all but name, in exchange for nothing.

The Green Party – which, full disclosure, was the only party with which my political consulting firm had a contract – devoted money and resources to winning many more seats. In the end, it only added one. And its quixotic leader, Elizabeth May, finally was obliged to take a hint and resign.

Finally, Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party did not win a single seat. Not one. And the only seat it had – Bernier’s, which had been previously held by his father – was lost, crushed by his Conservative opponent.

So who won the October 2019 election?

The separatists did. Under Yves-François Blanchet, the Bloc Québécois dramatically improved its standing in the House of Commons – from ten seats at dissolution, to 32 now.

Blanchet eviscerated the NDP, denied the Liberals a majority, and helped reduce the Conservatives’ presence in Quebec. His Bloc is now the third-largest group in the House of Commons, and arguably the most effective Opposition party.

All of that explains, then why the anniversary of Canada’s October 2019 election didn’t attract much attention:

Every Canadian political party lost – except the political party that wants to break up Canada.

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