Here are 9 ways to stay grounded and keep perspective during the next two weeks, sure to be among the noisiest, confusing, and stressful in recent memory.

I call it the Trump Era, and it will be spectacular, one way or the other. But best to be ready for it.

I was around for the ’60s, and I believe those days were a lot worse than these.

I  was a reporter then, and I often thought the Republic was splitting in half and coming apart at the seams- ugly riots,  racial upheaval, assassinations, bitter divisions, class wars, and a government that was failing profoundly and had lost public trust.

Our very democracy is always at stake, and half the country sees the world in one way, half the other. That is our destiny.

Never mind the Great Depression, the Witch Hunts, the struggle over slavery,   the Civil War, or the American Revolution, a time of great sacrifice, bloodshed, and the deepest divisions.

Nothing is really new; God is just merciful; he permits us to forget our sorry past and wrap ourselves in nostalgia and lies.

Some of these ideas are mine, some from Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight site, some from Grandma Jean, a wise woman in Wisconsin I have never met and will never meet but count as a mentor and a friend and regular e-mailer.

One. Stay close to the center. Skip the hot rhetoric.

The country has been pushed to extremes, Armageddon on one side, the Apocalypse on the other. The left believes a Trump victory would destroy our way of life; the Right says the same thing. We have lost our ability to win or lose with grace and acceptance. Both qualities are essential if democracy is to work; that is our worse problem in many ways because it leads to all the others.

We face many struggles, but the end of the world is not yet one of them., although you might say we are edging closer. Perspective is essential to peace of mind. Be careful who you listen to. Be careful online. Do some thinking in solitude, not always at the mercy of others.

On November 4, our world will look very much the same, no matter who wins. Whatever happens, we will be called to rise to it, learn from it, and grow with it. And if necessary, fight for it. Stay calm. Be Strong.

Two: You don’t need to follow all media; pick the one you trust. In the 24 news cycle that is the Internet, there is 24 hours worth of time, but only a few minutes worth of news.

Repeating the same news – especially if it disturbs you, as our President so often does – will make you absolutely crazy (nothing will make you crazier) and keep you spinning. Be good to yourself. Watch once or twice a day; if anything severe happens, the news will find you.

If you watch the news 200 times a day, you will get exactly what you are asking for, and it won’t be the good information that you need.

Three. Remember the elephant in the room, the true force in the 2020 elections.  More than 210,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, and everyone in the country has been affected by it.

Far from turning the corner, we are running right the wall behind it. Cases and hospitalizations are growing in most parts of the country; more deaths are predicted to follow. President Trump’s approval ratings on COVID-19 are much worse than his overall approval numbers. The pandemic is much more important to most voters than whatever is in Hunter Biden’s e-mails or how old his father is.

Four. For truth and perspective’s sake, don’t assume the race is in the bag. This is something every honest journalist, pollster, or politician needs to say, because human beings are sometimes unpredictable, and because Trump still has a 12 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, according to the Five Thirty-Eight-Model, the best in the country,  as of Sunday afternoon.

Please understand (I can feel the blood pressure rising all the way from the farm) that this doesn’t mean he is likely to win.

The only way he would have no chance of winning is if he had zero chance of winning, that is not plausible in an election contest gauging the intentions of more than 300 million people.

But polling is a polished, established science, look to 2018, not 2016, to gauge its accuracy.

If Joe Biden maintains his current lead in the polls, Trump’s chances will fall further. The best forecasts, including FiveThirtyEight’s, think it’s more likely that the race will tighten to some degree.

His base is very loyal to him. I always try to remember that many people dearly love this man and believe him to be the Perfect President. That might seem incomprehensible to many, but it is the truth. I try to stay out of bubbles; they kill the mind. Your victory will be somebody else’s pain and loss; the opposite is also true.

The depth of Biden’s victory will influence his ability to accomplish things in Washington. The Senate and many statehouses are in play. For Biden to enact meaningful change, he will need a commanding victory.

Five: It’s not true that polling is broken and can’t be trusted.

From Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight:

“Polling is an imperfect instrument, more so in some years than others. However, 2016 — while far from a banner year from the polls — was not quite so bad as some critics assume. The national polls were pretty good, and Trump’s wins in the swing states were not that surprising based on those states’ close margins beforehand. Meanwhile, 2018, with the midterms, was one of the more accurate years for polling on record.

One other thing to keep in mind about polls in an election like this one: They provide some way to measure public sentiment, however imperfect, independent of election results, which could be important if the election is disputed. It’s not surprising then that Trump frequently disparages polls — which could give Americans more confidence about the results if they closely resemble the polls — when he’s also repeatedly failed to commit to accepting the results of the election.”

Six: 2020 is not 2016.

It is for too many traumatized Democrats, progressives, and liberals. Many things about America are different than many things in 2020, including the voting population and demographic, and Trump himself.

He has never grown, never changed, never expanded his sense of the Presidency to include you and me, and hardly anyone reading this.

Trump has been intensely unpopular all through his term, and that has never changed. Even if the polls were wrong, there is no reason to think they will be wrong in the same ways as some were in 2016.

They might be greatly underestimating Biden’s support. It would take at least a 9-point national polling error to get Trump to win in the Electoral College. That is not statistically or intuitively likely to happen.

Trump supporters are louder and more enthusiastic than Biden supporters. The Democrats never imagined a 79-year old career Democratic functionary would be their President. He was never their first choice, but many are coming to appreciate that he is the right person for now. He is truly inclined to unite, not divide.

Many people who did not want him to be the candidate are voting for him; their distaste and rage at Donald Trump is the fuel that is firing this election year. So no, the enthusiasm ratio is not the same. And so what?

The progressive idea – that everything is on the line from basic freedom to free elections to climate change – seems to be powering a great wave.

Seven: Don’t pay much attention to individual polls; wait for polling averages to move. Starting tomorrow, there are likely to be lots of polls the rest of the way. On any single day, it will be possible to take the two or three best polls and Biden and tell a story of his holding or expanding his lead, or the two or three best polls for Trump and make a claim the race is tightening. Some polls are good; some are not, some are partisan, some are quite honest.

More great advice from Silver, the place I will go for these daily averages:

“Resist buying too much into those (above) narratives. Instead, turn to polling averages like FiveThirtyEight’s that are smart at distinguishing (ahem) the signal from the noise. We program our averages to be more aggressive in the closing days of the campaign — so if there’s a shift in the race, our average should start to detect it within a few days.

But while there is such a thing as underreacting to news developments, the more common problem in the last days of a campaign is false positives, with partisans and the media trying to hype big swings in the polls when they actually show a fairly steady race.”

Eight: Forget About “October Surprises”

While the FBI’s inappropriate posturing about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails mattered in the 2016 election, triggering a 3 point shift in the final days of the campaign, that is not likely to happen again.

Trump has little credibility left, even among his own followers. The right-wing media bubble – Fox News, a score of conservative websites –  is active and toxic, but the other side has its own media bubble, just as active and often as toxic.

They balance one another off. Elections rarely shift in the waning days of a campaign. National polling averages since 1972 have shifted by an average of 1.8 points and a medium of just 1.4 points in the final days of presidential elections ever since.

The election meddling dangers are substantial if the race boils down to a few thousand votes in certain states, and the rest of the election is a dead heat. I just don’t see that happening. Of course, I could be wrong, and as many people tell me, “I hope you are right.” I can’t say that I will be right, only that I will be honest. That will have to do, I’m afraid.

My daughter and I were joking on the phone tonight about the escape routes into Canada – we do live in a border state –  if I’m wrong, and we were laughing out loud. That in itself was a good sign.

Nine: Those Bedwetters. Can We Be Hopeful As Well As Scared?

As we know by now, one of the ironies of the campaign is that Trump supporters, who are believed to be losing, are enthusiastic and absolutely confident that their candidate will win, and resoundingly.

In all my hundreds, even thousands of e-mail exchanges with Trump loyalists in recent months, I have yet met a one who didn’t say Donald Trump would win re-election, no doubt about it.

On the other side, it’s almost shockingly different.

Despite the likelihood of a great victory, I get an almost equal number of messages reflecting worry, uncertainty, and the deep trauma inflicted by the unexpected loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

I think many Democrats will never get over it, even if Joe Biden wins.

It may well take the next generation of progressives and liberals to be confident and certain about their cause and their hopes for success.  Enthusiasm is infectious. So is gloom.

I believe our feelings listen to us and follow our lead. I never speak poorly to mine.

Since I was a bedwetter, I also started using the term and then dropped it, as I was offending many liberals and a good number of my friends.

It is a dismissive and somewhat offensive term – Biden campaign workers coined it to deal with all the worry and gloom they are encountering – so I don’t use it any longer.

But I’m not as sorry as I should be for using it at all.

I am frustrated by people who cannot be hopeful or even optimistic and tremble in worry and fear even at the edge of a hard-fought victory.

Win or lose, I don’t get the point of doom. Why not err on the side of hope, if we have to err at all?

Trump has done many awful things; he has inspired or influenced or triggered an awful lot of good things.

He brought the stalled women’s revolution to life.

He did the same for Black Lives Matter by his racist and bone-headed response to the death of  George Floyd and others. BLM is now the largest social movement in the history of America.

He forced us to choose between hatred and naked racism and something better. It is distressing that so many people will follow him down that path, but that is part of our democracy as well. One step at a time.

Trump-inspired the rapid growth of the MeToo movement as well, the brave Suburban Moms of Portland, now also a national movement. Courageous black athletes are taking a knee in the NFL.  A lot of those confederate statues are coming down, and America is listening to LeBron James, not Kanye West.

Trump’s medieval opposition to science has made Anthony Fauci one of America’s most powerful and trusted people. And the country has a keen awareness of the importance of science it was losing.

Trump’s blindness about climate change and his slavish devotion to the fossil fuel industry has made climate change a national political issue for the first time. This is the issue of the young, and they are on it. The Republican Party will long regret its blindness to this issue.

Last week, an entire presidential debate segment was devoted to the topic, which is a historical first.

As the descendant of refugees, I believe Trump has also awakened many of us to the great injustice he has done to refugees and immigrants and their importance to our culture, history, and economic health.

The progressive movement has never been more organized, vital, or popular, not in my lifetime. And a lot of brave civil servants have risked their careers to speak the truth.

It is difficult to measure momentum, but it feels like a great big wave to me.

I believe the center has held and will continue to hold.

Let’s face it; democracy is a mess and has always been a mess. I think of Ruth Bader Ginsburgh’s wise and well-earned advice: One step at a time. Stay Calm. Be  Strong.

By all means, fret and worry if that works for you, it’s not for me to tell you how to feel.  Some things are bad; some things are better than ever.

People can feel more than one thing at a time.  And do something. It is better to do good than arguing about what good is. We are dreaming of a kinder and gentler country. I can feel it in the air.

Permitting some hope and optimism might be a gift to you as well as to other people in distress. It is a message that is true and that people need to hear.