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2020 US Presidential Election Results - Discussion Thread
This will be a noisy thread. Please use the ignore feature if you do not want to see it in your feed.
This is a continuation of the original thread from election day, which was here.
These threads are intended as more conversational spaces to process the day and results. Consider this an open forum for your own thoughts and feelings.
There is also a thread here in ~news that's more focused on articles and events.
So genuine question: what went so badly wrong for the Democrats, that when you have a corrupt, serial rapist, authoritarian neofascist in power, you only end up winning by the skin of your teeth? Why wasn't this the repudiation of the Trump presidency that so many people expected it to be?
If I may offer some advice, as a non-US person... ensuring the integrity of your democracy is now the key issue that needs tackling for democrats. Climate change, employee rights, demographic rights, and healthcare need to wait. You can't pass partisan issues when the deck is stacked so heavily against you. What needs to change:
This is basically hard to impossible given Dems didn't win the senate. But political integrity has to come before all other policy.
I think one of the biggest things that may also explain the polling miss is the huge increase in turnout.
In 2016 Clinton had ~66M votes and Trump had ~63M votes.
As of right now, Biden boosted his total to ~72.5M but Trump pulled in a record turnout for the GOP at ~69M votes. I think most peoples' priors (perhaps the models as well?) assumed increased turnout would more heavily favour Democrats.
The Senate isn't decided yet. There will be a double run-off in Georgia in January to decide those seats because no candidate reached 50% of the vote.
Also to answer your questions, propaganda. That is how tens of millions of people voted for Trump after 4 years of this. There is an extreme amount of misinformation circulating, and the Trump admin actively ignored the situation or made it worse by amplifying misinformation and corrupting government for personal political gain at every conceivable opportunity.
There really is a mind-blowing amount of it. Remember when Trump said he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th ave and get away with it? He really could, even if it was recorded by dozens of phones. The amount of spin that would be spun at such an event could make the Earth start turning backward. By the end of the day we'd be debating the legitimacy of the claim that the victim was a member of AntiFa and Trump acted in self defense. By the end of the week we'd have shifted our outrage to the fact that alphabet agents stormed some apartment and killed 5 more people because they where secretly trying to undermine Qanon, as proven by some toTaLy rEal doCuMeNts that someone found and Trump retweeted at 3am.
I think your advice doesn't match the question?
The US election process is rather rickety and convoluted, but this isn't news. It seems to be holding up well under pressure. Attempts to suppress the vote seem not to have worked since turnout is at a record high. For all his bluster, Trump seems not to be able to do anything to stop the vote counting process either.
As for how we got here, it's because the country is divided and that seems not to have changed. This isn't new, exactly, since 20 years ago we had Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and another very close election, that was worse run than this one.
Your advice is about ways to try to guarantee victory for the Democrats, but it's not going to solve the fundamental problem. A "repudiation" isn't going to happen until Trump fans abandon him, and I don't think that's going to happen soon. Even out of office, Trump is going to be running his circus for the rest of his life. Will Republican senators still be afraid of him? I think so, since as long as he's still popular with their base, he can disrupt their election chances.
It might not match the question—but it does seem to me they're somewhat tied, for example if the Republican Party had to achieve broader appeal than just targeting very specific locations with inflammatory messaging like "Dems are socialists", then there'd be no chance of threading the needle to win an election so to speak, and you have to compete on popular vote alone, which would make the Republicans significantly less competitive and in need of a broader appeal.
I mean, is it though? So many supposed "checks and balances" have been neutered under the current administration. I also don't understand the insistence of calling the United States a "great experiment in democracy"—like it's a uniquely novel idea that allows for the occasional failure. Surely we are well fucking past that point in humanity, like, no, a democracy should be rock solid, not cast as an "experiment".
Perhaps I've just become more anti-U.S. in the past decade, so a lot of this could be my bad interpretations of what I see as a corrupt, failing system.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that this is right and the only long-term solution is going to be to divide the country. I'm pretty sure that the American South as an independent nation would not be a pretty place, but I'm also just incredibly exhausted with their shenanigans. Dissolving the Union and reforming it as 3-5 independent countries would be incredibly messy, but the current path we're headed down looks even messier and more uncertain to me.
You're proposing a radical solution as an alternative for muddling through. How can that possibly be better?
For me or for everyone? It seems pretty obvious to me that if I never had to give a damn about what anyone in the South thought about anything ever again my life would be a whole lot easier.
The south is also home to huge communities of minorities, who would be way up shit creek without federal support.
So abortion rights don't matter to you? And that's just for starters.
I don't see secession ever happening. I could realistically see more things being decided by the states, due to Supreme Court rulings or in a similar way to how many states ignore federal law for drug legalization. But states' rights won't be good for many issues Democrats think are important, and it won't stop legal battles within states, between rural and urban areas.
A much easier solution is just to stop paying attention to politics for a while, if you can manage that. Radical solutions like this wouldn't make politics less interesting.
I already don't pay much attention to politics, but it's hard to ignore policy (especially when I'm employed by a Federal contractor).
Abortion isn't very high on my priority list right now one way or another, but in general I don't think it's a Federal issue. I also live in a state where it's a non-issue. Abortion rights in the South certainly don't matter to me.
I agree that I don't see it happening right now, but I also see the US becoming increasingly divided and tense and I really don't see how it can go one. It's obvious at this point that the Democrats aren't going to gain enough of a foothold to make the Republicans irrelevant and allow a new more moderate party (or a new more moderate part of the Republican party) to take the stage as the second dominant party, and that was my only real hope for the country.
It still seems like the main thing standing in the way of progress (as progressives see it) is Republicans? I don't really see how corporations have any control over that sort of ideological movement. If corporations controlled things, we wouldn't have Trump.
Bloomberg just spent $100 million in Florida, Ohio, and Texas, with nothing to show for it.
Sure, money helps, but if the voters aren't receptive, turns out it's wasted. Lots of big money projects turn out that way.
It's true that I'm skeptical, but I re-read your last few comments and it seems like you're asserting what you believe is true without really making arguments for how you know it's true?
But that's a lot of work, so okay, I guess we'll just have to leave it at that.
I don't see how it doesn't go on. Is there any time limit on divided and tense?
Well, yes. If things continue down the current path I expect we will eventually see violence that is so widespread that the Federal government will no longer be capable of effectively governing. We have 300 million people locked in a country together with about as many guns and no release valve. These people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on how the country should be run, and are becoming more polarized every year. Eventually it's going to explode.
Well, someone does explode every so often. And then we keep going, because what else is there to do?
Between 1971 and 1972 there were almost five bombings a day. Then it stopped, and people forgot about it.
https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/
Well there's a few ways to answer this question. I suppose it would largely depend on what all you consider to the be the deal-breakingly bad aspects of Trump. The general answer though, is that they don't care.
Sure, there are some people that want a white-supremacist authoritarian in power, but that is a very small portion of this country. Furthermore, many of them don't like Donald Trump, at least not after his first term. If they are voting for him in 2020, its probably for the same reasons as the rest of his supporters in a fascist's idea of harm reduction.
Now, "don't care" has a lot of different shapes, more than caring does. Not caring about Trump being a rapist could be that they don't believe his accusers, so they don't care about the accusations. It could be that they think Joe Biden is a hair-eating rapist, so they don't care that Trump is also a rapist. However, the most important point, is that they truly do not care if Trump is a rapist, because it isn't what is important to them. They view Joe Biden, or any democrat (at least at the national level), as worse than a rapist. Why, even if they did prefer a rapist, they would consider other things more important.
What they care about varies a bit, but the usual topics are gun control, abortion, law & order, immigration, and a host of economic positions (which overlaps with immigration).
Its also worth mentioning that they view Biden as an extension of the Democratic party in a way that only hurts him. Which not only will make him seem less appealing on important issues, but also worse on issues like 'being a rapist' due to things such as conspiracy theories involving Jeffery Epstein.
Also, pretty much anything that can be said regarding Trump being a rapist, can be said again for him being a fascist, or a racist, or corrupt, or inept, or mentally unsound.
Also there is no way substantial election reform will stick anytime soon.
Every state that signed onto this is consistently going blue. If it ever actually did something, it would not last long.
Requires an amendment and thus 34 states, not happening
Not that unfeasible actually, could see the Democratic party having the chance. Though, what makes you think they would go blue? D.C. would, but they already already get to vote for the president.
Has to be done state by state. Would be great, but the two parties have every reason not to. Also it wouldn't cause the popular vote to determine the winner.
Not sure how this would go down, though my guess is not great? Again, more feasible as its just a bill.
Would be nice, but I doubt many state legislators would be willing to give up that power. Those that would probably don't need it. Again, no direct affect on presidential elections.
I don't think this is fixed by the democrats having a better platform, or by picking a better candidate. It's just that millions of people want a corrupt, authoritarian neo fascist.
While the majority of the nation's population lives in metropolitan areas, the thing to consider is only a fraction of those Democrat-skewed populations are paying attention. Check out any county-level election map, you'll see a similar breakdown of partisan victory that resembles the national scale (most populous states tending towards Democrats).
I think the major thing is people don't know, or don't care about the bad stuff Trump has done. My mom's boyfriend, for example, loves the guy, but seems to be ignorant about the serious problems the dude has.
That's a major goal for American progressives, at least, but even this goal is somewhat biased. We want it gone because the popular vote will benefit us and our goals. The people in the majority of the states that tend to flip elections don't want it because they lose representation. I've been thinking about it, and there's not a good position either way. Either a majority of states with a (large) minority of the population dictate policy for the majority population, or a majority of the population in a minority of states dictates policy for the majority of the states. I'd say then, the interstate compact may be the best way forward on that, honestly.
Not even for electoral reasons. They're close enough, and are economically tied to us, they should get a say in the government that steers them. Really, even if any US territory wanted to be a state, I'd say we should admit them with no vote on our side, just using their referendum result, and just worry about the mechanics.
If one side can add justices, the other can. Then you have the potential for an ever-expanding court, which undermines the goal of it in the first place. A mechanism to remove poorly-picked justices, which exists, is the best way forward on this because if the Democrats add two seats for their agenda, the Republicans will the next round, and repeat, and we don't solve anything.
This just makes the SCOTUS operate closer to the President or Congress. It becomes a regular power play, rather than a good-faith submission, even if these submissions tend to be partisan. I don't like it, but I've never seen a solid justification for change. I think we need Congress term limits, however, I don't like that I've had the same senators most of my life (I'm 30, they've been in place for 20 years), and I think this would keep some of our worst representatives at all levels out of power.
This is sort of how it's designed, but the issue is you still need people on the ground. Parties aren't magical entities that exist above Americans, the are Americans, and everybody has an alignment, particularly those that are more inclined towards any sort of civil volunteership.
I think the best thing we can do is widespread voter enfranchisement. We're finding that higher voter turnouts are generally more progressive voter turnouts anyway because apparently when the majority of the country actually votes on something, you find they're actively voting for their own long-term interests. The major issues are standard problems with the corruptive influence of power, which while not a certainty in a given candidate, unfortunately is bipartisan and affects every level of government to some extent.
For real. I don't think there is any legitimate reason why all of the US territories shouldn't be admitted as full states the day they decide they want to be. Taxation without representation was one of America's founding battlecries. On top of that you add that one of them is DC itself, the literal political center of the country, and it's baffling.
I don't doubt either party would do similar, but if that behavior is going to stay the same, there's no need to do it on a court that consists of an ever-expanding number of seats.
If we get a blue Congress with Biden as president, if a conservative justice were to die, or even if we were to remove Kavanaugh and Barrett, I don't doubt that seat would be filled in a similar timeframe as Amy Comey Barrett was put in.
You've provided another example that the argument for packing the court is based on the fact that it feels good to say "We're going to stick it to the Republicans for what they did." It doesn't consider the likely retaliation that will occur. The other was somebody I asked on Reddit who simply said it's easier to expand than to remove justices, but the easy way is rarely ever the correct way.
If one side expands the court to pack it in their favor (it's odd-numbered by design), the other side can just expand the court. Whenever one side is unhappy about how the court is laid out, they'll simply add more.
It doesn't matter if there's bad decisions by 6-3 or 6-5, or 7-6 in terms of vote ratios. The moment it is expanded for partisan politics, there will be a responding extension to account for the perceived bias of the court.
It sucks that Barrett and Kavanaugh were put in the way they were, but expanding the court for partisan packing is not a tenable solution in the long-term.
We might be talking past each other, but I get where you're coming from now. I didn't even know Republican packing was a concern, but two minutes of research corrected me on it. It makes sense they'd yell about the Democrats doing it to the SCOTUS if they've been doing it in state courts.
I'm still torn on whether to give it a chance not to happen, or consider it as inevitable and strike first. I see it as a lose/lose situation.
Ok, but in one of the two losing situations democrats have a significant (if not majority) number of judges, and in the other they have the high ground and minimal representation in the courts. How much is the high ground worth, if every legal ruling turns against them?
That's the point of my conflict, and if I try to consider it from a non-partisan position, I get stuck.
If it comes down to those two options, and one thinks the Democrats would be better for the country (at this point it's almost proven), then obviously the first condition is the way to go.
What's stopping them from packing the court right now? They're still in power for another couple of months regardless of the election outcome.
Pretty sure it requires passing a law, and the Democrats control the House. It would only be possible for a party that controls the House, Senate, and Presidency.
Ah, you are correct. I didn't realize that. So packing the court effectively requires that a single party control the presidency and both houses of congress. Will be interesting to see when if ever that happens again.
I think it's unfortunate (both for them and for US politics) that Supreme Court Justices often serve until death, and a minor tweak would help. Something like this:
This would result in a two-term president being able to appoint 4 Justices. Justices would serve 18 years on average, which seems long enough. If a Justice resigns or dies early, the other Justices with more seniority end up serving two more years than they would have.
(There is an edge case if several justices resign or die at close to the same time resulting in only a few justices remaining on the court, so there would have to be a special procedure for getting to a quorum.)
I was going to say this seems like it would change the court too quickly, with a single president potentially appointing nearly half the justices, but it looks like the average tenure of a SCOTUS justice is only 16 years to begin with, so the term seems fine. Still, it only takes 3 consecutive terms with the same party in the White House to guarantee a 6-3 majority in the court, which as far as I can recall was unprecedented until this year in my 33 year lifetime. I'm not convinced that this is as minor a tweak as it sounds.
I haven't actually looked, but I don't think this has happened very many times (if ever?). Also one could make the argument that if the election went to the same party 3 times that it's sensible the justices should reflect that trend.
Overall this has been my favorite option that I've heard so far regarding the reformation of the SC.
I did look at that too and it hasn't actually happened entirely within my lifetime. The last time was Reagan/Bush Sr. and it's not particular common. My larger concern is that I don't want the court to shift over just a single decade. The court should, in my mind, be a (little c!) conservative body. I.e. it should change more slowly than the rest of government, not in sync with it.
I like @knocklessmonster's idea. lessen the impact of a two term president.
Sadly, I don't think it much matters since we're firmly in constitutional amendment territory and the country is so divided at this point that I doubt we could pass a constitutional amendment endorsing apple pie.
It looks like you're right, changing how long Supreme Court Justices serve would take an amendment since the Constitution does say they "shall hold their offices during good behavior". But it wouldn't take an amendment to say that the President gets to appoint two Justices per term. (This is sort of like court packing but without a fixed number of judges.)
I guess they could just strongly hint that someone should resign, and maybe it would become a tradition?
I'd propose one modification: Two Justices per president, not per term. Meaning, T1Y1/T2Y1, if they think they'll get re-elected, they can space out their nominations, or not do it.
It's a pretty good idea, though, considering the alternating pattern of our president's affiliation, and would prevent somebody like ACB being on for close to 50 years.
My advice to NZ? Don't let Rupert Murdoch buy Sky.
Don't forget these:
Reforming the Senate (although this would be a constitutional challenge even with lots of support or power which you clearly don't have so more a hypothetical)
Increasing the number of house districts and make them multi-winner (and eventually turn the whole thing to a parliament, although I'm not sure what would it take to change the house that fundamentally, I'd imagine it would take an amendment so also a hypothetical)
Nuking citizens United
And just making it easier to vote and easier for poll workers to do their job, even if they only do this periodically.
Automatically voter registration when you turn 18.
Letting released (maybe not even that) felons vote nationally.
Just increasing the number of polling stations and doing everything you can to stop any opposition to this.
Making election day a national holiday. (for any essential work that can't be stopped, just let them use the mail like right now)
And that's still not close to the full list, as evidenced by stuff like Trump's influence in the DOD for example, and just generally doing everything you can to make sure social media platforms take moderation (and the people doing that work) seriously.
None of this addresses the real issue, which is that there is no sane world in which 40-some percent of the electorate votes for Trump. I said this in the last thread, but I'm going to keep repeating it. It doesn't matter if we tweak things to make it harder for the Republicans to win. Whether it's 49, 45, or 30%, the fact that a huge chunk of the electorate voted for Trump after everything that's been done and/or exposed in the last 4 years is a much deeper cancer in our society that we need to find a way to fix.
Agreed. Sanity is a part of mental illness (I've certainly lost my sanity several times), but it is perfectly reasonable to use it outside that context.
People who voted for Trump, whatever the reason, are insane. It well might not be their fault, or a mental illness. Irrational doesn't quite capture the severity of it....religion by-and-large is irrational. But voting for Trump is being in denial of reality.
@suspended's sentiment is correct here. I'll concede that "rational" would be a better word than "sane". I'm not sure it's a huge distinction though to be honest.
Trump signaled quite clearly that he would try to subvert the election if it didn't go his way, and he is indeed trying to subvert the election. Anyone who was aware of this and voted for him is at best opposed to democracy, which I see as a major problem. Given how widespread the reporting has been, anyone who wasn't aware is a danger to democracy in their own right, though perhaps passively rather than actively so.
I'm starting to think that considering Trump and what he represents as authoritarian/fascist/racist/just-plain-horrible is something of a mistake. Sure, he is all of those things, but those are a side-effect of him being a plain old reactionary.
Perhaps things will make more sense if I give an example. A story has just come out that there is a train of people travelling through Mexico trying to reach the US to apply for asylum. If you are like the majority of people here on Tildes, you will have caught on to the fact that these people are looking for asylum and that these people need help. But imagine for a moment that you don't read into the story; just the headlines. That asylum part probably did not make the cut. And you've probably heard a lot of other headlines (which you have also not read past) where people are calling them rapists and murderers. Now imagine that there's this guy who wants to be president who is not only saying the exact thing you are thinking, but he actually thinks the exact same way you are right now. And best of all, he's not a politician, whom headlines are constantly telling us are bad people.
Within this framework, Trump is no longer a failure of democracy to save itself; it's democracy in it's purist form in action. While doing things like inviting new states and removing the electoral college might get rid of current-trump, they do nothing to get rid of future trump-like reactionary figures from becoming popular and eventually overtaking the popular vote.
If you don't think this framework is accurate, just look at the vote totals right now. There isn't only a 'blue wave' to contend with. Trump is also gathering record-high votes because people are reacting to the threat of losing the election and having all of their fears unleashed as 'the other guy' undoes all of the things Trump has achieved, without knowing weather or not that is a good thing.
One popular thing that I see coming up from time to time is that we need to spend more time and resources educating people so that they don't make stupid votes like this, but the truth of the matter is that there is no issue with people being uneducated, it's a problem of ignorance, and the root of this ignorance is intellectual laziness, to which there is no real cure. And to that end, perhaps the electoral college might not be as bad an idea as we make it out to be (or perhaps it would be if our electors actually had the balls to go against the popular vote when it comes to guys like Trump).
I know we've already beaten the drum on this for a long time, but I think the bigger problem is that our news media is very reactionary by nature. It's not like the reactionary left doesn't exist as well. The problem is that the only way I can think to fix the problem is to effectively end what we know of as free media, and that is a dramatically unpopular and effectively impossible solution.
Sorry about that, I deleted it because I significantly expanded my comment and didn't want to have the (edited) next to it—which is now moot anyway because I had to fix a grammatical error 🙄
Just an update for anyone not closely following... as of about noon CST on the 5th, we're still waiting on less than two million ballots to be counted across Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Alaska, and Arizona. Most of the ballots remaining are early and absentee ballots from metropolitan and suburban areas, so they're expected to lean heavily towards Biden.
Biden is ahead by 1% and 2% in Nevada and Arizona, respectively, and Trump by 0.3%, 1.4%, and 1.8% in Georgia, NC, and Pennsylvania.
Trump's only path to victory requires Pennsylvania and either Nevada or Arizona. He'll probably take North Carolina and Alaska, so I'm going to ignore them. If Biden wins Georgia, Trump needs both Nevada and Arizona for an electoral college tie (he would have the advantage in that case).
Biden can take Pennsylvania to win and/or any two of Nevada, Arizona, or Georgia.
Election analysts are pretty confident that Biden will eventually take the lead in Pennsylvania, but it still might take a couple days for those votes to be counted. They're also indicating that Nevada is very close to being called for Biden. Arizona is still up in the air, but it's worth mentioning Fox News and the AP actually called it for Biden last night so if they call Nevada, they'll either have to uncall Arizona or project Biden as the winner. Biden is extremely close to pulling ahead in Georgia, needing about 60-70% of the remaining ballots. It's totally within reasonable possibility and we'll probably find out before the end of today.
Also, it's now evident that both of Georgia's senate races will proceed to runoffs, as the leading candidates in both are now under 50% of the vote.
EDIT, as of 5pm CST:
Biden's lead in Nevada is down to 0.9% but 90% of the remaining votes are from a very blue county so Biden will probably prevail. Trump's lead in Georgia is down to 0.2%, fewer than 10,000 votes, with fewer than 50k ballots left to count. Trump's lead in Pennsylvania is down to 1.2%, about ~80k. Even in very red counties there, Biden is winning or breaking even in the batches that have been reported in the past few hours, and there's still a few hundred thousand left to be counted from urban and suburban counties.
EDIT, as of 6:30, Trump's lead in Georgia is down to just 3,635 votes, with another 20k or so left to count.
EDIT, as of 1AM, the margin in Pennsylvania is down to about 18k votes and 1.2k in Georgia with plenty of outstanding ballots in both that will almost certainly skew enough in Biden's favor for him to eventually pull ahead. There's still a chance Arizona could flip back to Trump, but Biden won't need it. At this point, news agencies are probably waiting to call the race just because they don't want to give Trump any fuel by calling Pennsylvania while he's still officially ahead. I'm going to bed.
Honestly, anyone who votes Democrat should be donating and volunteering to help Georgia pull this off in January. I donated to Warnock's campaign and signed up to volunteer yesterday before it became clear Perdue's seat would go to a run-off too. I'm a former Georgia resident with a lot of friends in Atlanta, and we are all talking and organizing.
Just from briefly following the race I've come to sincerely like Warnock, even setting all partisan considerations aside. You guys will be lucky to have him!
Ossoff is about as exciting as a bowl of shredded wheat, but at least it's healthy.
Also RIP to your mailboxes. I am sorry for the amount of spam you're all about to get. (Some of which might come from me).
I haven't seen much commentary on the likely outcome of the run-off elections in Jan. It's probably too early to try to analyze it, but is there a general consensus on the probability of both seats going Democrat?
Georgia is currently down to about a 12,700 lead for Trump, and an official with the secretary of state's office recently said that there are 47,277 ballots remaining to be counted.
If those numbers are correct, somewhere around 65% of the remaining votes will need to be for Biden for him to take the lead.
Lead is down to under 4,000 with most of the remainder being outside of Savannah. I think it’s gonna flip!
Just a few minutes ago on the NYT live updates:
A 60% Biden / 40% Trump split in those last 19,000 will just barely do it (and it'll definitely be inside the 0.5% difference threshold to request a recount regardless).
Battleground state margins scraped from NYT data
This is fantastic, thanks for sharing this.
Based on votes remaining, and the percent going to each candidate, it appears Biden will overtake and win both PA and GA. Which is exciting. I'll keep holding my breath though.
On the other hand, Arizona also looks on track to flip despite Fox and AP calling it early, so Pennsylvania and/or Georgia are not just "nice to have". I too am still most definitely holding my breath.
I'm mostly looking at this page. If the ratio stays the same through the rest of the count it will flip. Nate Silver mentioned that there's some reason to think that they won't, but didn't give much detail. Until I see an actual change in the counts coming in, I'm assuming it's going to flip.
The CNN analyst said last night that as long as all the new votes in AZ coming in were over 59% in favor of Trump, the State will flip before the end. And looking at the data you linked, supposedly he only needs 57.62% of all the newly counted votes now to win it.... and at this exact moment is still averaging ~59.0% of all the newly counted votes. So yeah, it's probably going to be ridiculously close. :(
The main live results page on NYT just added a "vote margin over time" graph for each state showing actual vote numbers for the margins (instead of just percentages) and how they've been changing as more votes are counted.
Lots of people celebrating because apparently "Decision Desk HQ" (I hadn't heard of this org before today, personally) has now called the race for Biden, awarding him PA after he took a vote lead this morning, and having him already winning AZ.
I'm keeping my hopes neutral, I'll wait until the AP calls it. But the newest results after this morning's vote dumps from PA and GA are definitely spicing things up.
For what it's worth, Nate Silver of 538 said this in response to DDHQ's call:
I think a bit of optimism is warranted at this point.
While amusing, to someone like me who doesn't regularly follow political commentary so closely as to know who these people and institutions are, this amounts to little more than humorous pundits being humorous pundits. Again, I reserve my optimism for the final review of more established organizations. Call me a spoilsport if you must. I won't hold it against you. :)
Nate Silver is founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, which was originally a blog published under the NYT, but is now Disney/ABC News owned, and so is considered a pretty established and rather reputable organization at this point. He's also not just some random political pundit; He is a well respected analyst and statistician.
I'm not even American and yet am aware of who Nate and 538 are. They are kind of a big deal. :P
Thanks for the info! Guess I'm one of today's lucky 10,000.
@sron asked a great question in the previous thread:
Buzzfeed News has a good article on this: Trump Cannot Just “Go” To The Supreme Court To Fight Election Results. Here’s What Would Need To Happen To End Up There.
CNN had a hilarious chyron for that:
This is the article I needed. I've heard a lot from friends who are afraid Trump can just challenge the results before a Supreme Court stacked in his favor, but I couldn't adequately explain how it doesn't really work like that.
Interestingly enough, this speach was so bad and full of so many lies that a number of networks just decided to cut the feed partway though.
That speech was the first one of his I've ever watched in full, and I enjoyed it. Those were clearly the ravings of a deluded, unhinged maniac who is convinced he can lie his way into a second term—but there was a certain solemn, defeated tone in his voice. He knows deep down this is lost.
Georgia announces recount after presidential race too close to call with 4,169 ballots left to count.
What I find interesting is they are doing a voluntary recount without any candidate asking for it. Georgia has no automatic recount law. In normal circumstances a candidate would have to ask for it to be recounted. Now I'm sure that Biden won't fight this even though he's leading and Trump won't fight it because he's losing, but I can guarantee that if the situation was reversed and Trump was winning he'd sue to stop the recount to force Biden to request it.
Just 3635 votes separating Biden from Trump now in Georgia. I think the final EV result is going to be 306 to 232, which is a solid win, but I wouldn't call it convincing on the scale of what democrats wanted.
EDIT: 2497 votes difference, with 30,000+ remaining.
EDIT: 1267 votes difference. Still more to count.
Biden has now overtaken Trump in Georgia by 917 votes.
I think it's funny that, while the Tildes discussion has now filled one thread and moved on to a second, the Reddit discussion on r/politics is, at time of writing, on their 46th discussion thread and counting.
I wonder if this is actually representative of the population of each site that's interested in such political discussion? Obviously the nature of the comments in each place are quite different, which itself is quite interesting to observe, but I wonder if there's any correlation to be drawn or if this is truly just noise. :)
I did the math Wednesday morning and came up with some predictions.
Pennsylvania to Biden by at least 100k. Doesn't seem the margin will be that large, but I'm confident it will still go Biden.
Michigan and Georgia would go Biden by a hair. That seems to have held.
Arizona and Nevada were a tossup, and probably 1 but not the other.
All the other uncalled going to Trump. Glad I was wrong about Michigan. It reduced Trump's odds by a huge margin.
The methodology was to look at the turnout numbers and percentages from 2016 for the counties with < 90% reporting. Almost all of them were super-dense and generally > 70% turnout for Biden. PA I had the best numbers for, and the counts are largely lining up, although closer than I anticipated. The majority of the remaining votes are still from those counties, and keep in mind PA is still accepting ballots postmarked Nov 3rd until today.
Edit: Source of PA numbers for those interested
Complete sidenote that I couldn't find anything about - African American nativism and West Wing Series Realpolitik.
So Trump pulled pretty good in the African American community which at first I thought was kind of odd and then I remember reading some comment from IceCube about Trump where he talked being disappointed with both candidates and his project with the trump group in an interview with CNN
Then he expanded on the subject.
I thought that was an interesting distinction. I mean I get that there is a perceived conflict of minorities - if one gets attention there can often be the assumption that the others get less attention AND lets be honest African Americans is a minority that for 100+ years still haven't gotten out of the situation they are in so the frustration there seems fairly understandable. But that distinction though - a clear cut between not people of colour, not African-descendant people of colour - but people who are the descendants of slaves specifically.
Is this the birth of an American Nativist movement for African Americans?
As for the realpolitik - considering the focus on it in a wide range of areas it feels like having it here isn't that big of a surprise - but it still sort of got me off guard.
Bear in mind, exit polling when half of all votes were cast by mail are complete nonsense.
Sure, it seemed to be fairly clear in comparison with the past but only the future will tell I suppose if this is a trend that will grow further.
Again it’s not a trend. Exit polls only poll people walking out of polling centers. There was strong partisan sorting between in-person and mail voting. That means all exit poll results have a strong pro-Trump bias. It’s utter nonsense peddled by statistically illiterate journalists desperately looking for things to fill airtime talking about.
I understand that this is a stressful time and I am well aware of your opinion in this election, but I think there is enought leg work done to say that there are signs for a trend, and that that legwork is done by journalistic sources and groups that can't just be mushed in to that descritption.
I happily agree that its not by any way clear - but that there are signs pointing to it. "Possibly" of course but still enough to be interesting to talk about - and in my case the connection to US-nativism and the comments by IceCube which I thought was interesting.
From Fivethirtyeight, Oct 19th, "Trump Is Losing Ground With White Voters But Gaining Among Black And Hispanic Americans ", Geogreffy Skelley & Anna Wiederkehr
From Bloomberg Opinions, Oct 20th, "One Way Trump Is Doing Better Than Expected", Karl W Smith.
You are absolutely right, its estimates and looking for trends in a muddy soil - but thats all the work possible and all written work done currently on voter numbers and probabilities is dug from that same soil. Doesn't make it right - but it points to a trend, and if that holds (or doesn't and is proven to be arsewater) isn't up to you, or me, its something "only the future will tell".
I happily hope you're right I suppose - but I still find it fascinating. If problematic.
And adding "again" to the start implies you think I didn't read what you wrote last time out of refusal or inability. If you think so, please tell me directly.
Oh I had never heard of nativist African-Americans and the conflict between Immigrated African-Americans and non-immigrated.
EDIT: US-nativist I mean. Nationalism is common and a Africa-First styled movement or PanAfrican Movement - but not "Daughters of the Revolution" styled Nativism.
A bit of self promotion, but if you're interested in losing some brain cells and seeing what right-wing pundits are looking at on social media, here's an approximation of @benshapiro's Twitter feed.
Offtopic but is anyone else kinda irritated/bothered that the way votes are (being?) counted and "published" does not fit well with the "live" format of most election trackers? Maybe it's just me, since this is the first election I'm paying a serious amount of attention to and the first to take a serious amount of time thanks to the crown-virus but I feel either we need to set up ballot counting and registering to be friendly to the "sit down and watch the votes come in on the TV/website live" format or change election tracking sites to the NYTimes scraper/tracker kfwyre linked.
(reply to deleted comment.)
Here, in this very thread.