Jo Biden and Kamala Harris will become president and vice president today. I haven’t put a lot of my thoughts here in a while, but today feels like a good day to put some things into this pseudo-diary. It’s been a long four years, full of turmoil, and I’m hopeful for calmer days. Here are a few things, Trump-Biden related in no particular order.

I posted something on Facebook that’s dominating what I’m thinking about this morning.

This is pretty remarkable.

It’s not just remarkable because of the clear difference in approval ratings of republican and democrats leaving office, but there are other things that I find notable. Look at the ends of the terms in office. For every one of them, except for Trump, there is an uptick between election week and the last week in office. Bush goes from 28% approval the week of the election (in which he wasn’t a candidate) to 34% his last week in office. Trump, on the other hand, dropped from 43% to 34% between election week and his last week in office. I suspect that this is because of how poorly Trump has handled losing the election, and because of the riot at the Capitol Building by Trump supporters opposing the election. Regardless of the cause, it’s a notable decrease.

I’m also getting pretty annoyed with the FoxNews crowd that keeps talking about the 74 million Americans who won’t be silenced. I’m not at all disputing that 74 million Americans voted for Trump, that would be silly. But to think that all 74 million of those voters support whatever is being talked about in some particular moment is silly. Not to mention that Trump’s drop in approval ratings suggests that his number of supporters has gone down pretty significantly since the election. If we do the math, Trump’s approval suffered a 21% drop since election day. If that has bearing on the 74 million voters, that leaves Trump with 58.5 million. Still a pretty big number, but quite a bit smaller than 74 million. It’s also notable that Biden’s favorable/unfavorable ratings have stayed stable between election day and now, so in this exercise, he holds onto the 81 million Americans. So in the ratio of Biden support to Trump support has gone from a 5 percentage point lead for Biden to a 16% lead today.

I have no idea what will come next, but I’m looking forward to watching. I have hope for better days for the first time in a while.