[UPDATE: The AP has called Arizona for Biden, giving him 238 EVs. They also explain state by state the basis of each call.]
I followed the election results until about 11:00pm Pacific Time (Wednesday 2:00 am ET) and went to sleep feeling really depressed because at that time it looked like Trump would win. I woke up this morning fully expecting that he would have been declared the winner but was surprised and relieved to see that the contest is still open. As of this writing, Biden has 227 electoral votes while Trump has 213, leaving 98 EVs still to be allocated, with 270 needed to win.
There are still eight states still to be called by the AP , the only organization that I rely upon. These are Georgia (16), North Carolina (15), Alaska (3), Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16), Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), and Nevada (6). These make up 97 EVs. There is also a single congressional seat to be decided in Maine that will provide the last EV, which along with Nebraska, are the only two states which are not winner take all.
At this point, we should all take a deep breath and simply wait for the counting to continue.
When I wrote in my post A reality check before the election on Saturday that in my opinion the race was too close to call and I was not comfortable making a prediction, I was hoping that this prediction would be wrong, as my election predictions usually are, and that Biden would win easily. But as they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and this was one of those rare occasions.
As usually happens, Texas and Florida went Republican. These two states are the Lucy of elections, always teasing that they might go Democratic and then reverting to form. So I was not expecting this time to be any different and so was not really surprised at those outcomes.
It is disappointing that the Democrats may not get a majority in the Senate. They have gained just one seat so far and need another three. I would love to see Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell’s smug face get punched (metaphorically, of course). The Democrats also seem to be on track to lose some seats in the House of Representative, though they will very likely still be in the majority.
It is a shame that Biden didn’t manage to get Florida. That would have put him on 274 electors before the mail in ballots in the remaining states that are now going to Trump would have been counted (there are 2 states that will go his way with 16 electors total, 238+16+20 = 274).
It would at least have gotten Trump to shut up about that the damned states should stop counting since he was in the lead in the ones that haven’t published a result at the end of Nov 3rd.
2016 repeats itself, only more slowly and painfully. Approx 20 million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016 already. But these new voters were so far pretty evenly split between the Troll and Biden. So Biden is now winning the popular vote by nearly three million -- just as Clinton did -- and is likely to hold on that -- just like Clinton did.
But the way “democracy” works in the “best country in the world”., even if Biden wins the vote in the end -- which really, really comes down to a just a few tens of thousand votes in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin -- just one faithless elector going for Trump can give him the vote completely legally.
Not to mention that Supreme Court intervention is inevitable at this stage, Trump will insist on it, and the court will oblige.
I am afraid the results are not good. The only real hope was that Trump gets trounced so thoroughly, that no-one can dispute it. That did not happen. Half of USA are really, really stupid and evil people. Not misguided and mistaken, but stupid and evil.
Well I was wrong (again). The landslide against A-golf Twittler I envisaged was a mere smokescreen over the unpleasant truth, like the unreliable polls. And to say I’m flabbergasted is an understatement. I’m gobsmacked. I’m thunderstruck.
I believed there was an excuse for people voting for Chump the first time. Those that hadn’t followed his career could be forgiven for not knowing the narcissistic misogynistic cheat, crook, failure and father of lies that cared only about himself. However after four years of misrule, that excuse would be gone. Surely, I told myself, surely people would desert him in droves. But to discover they still voted for him… really????
I personally would literally have voted for just about anyone rather than Trump, whatever party they represented, and whatever party he represented. But then I’m not a US citizen, and I don’t get a say.
Now although Biden may still scrape a victory, whichever way it goes, half of the entire US still support the scumbag. Millions of people. I’m ashamed of the human race.
@file thirteen(#3):
Why would you be surprised? 538 put the chance of Trump winning at 1 in 8. Granted that is 40% of what they gave him against Hillary but that would still mean a close race.
What is more annoying is that it seems the democrats won’t be getting a majority in the senate and are actually losing seats in congress. Which means 4 years of active sabotage by the republicans through their ability to veto anything that comes through the senate if Biden wins.
Thought the current handling of the pandemic was bad? Just watch what happens if Biden wins to any bill that the democrats try to use to push it through and the lawsuits against any executive order while Trump keeps inciting his base to fight the ‘Usurper’. They’ll show the US citizens the consequence of daring to vote Biden into office.
@Who Cares #4
My mistake for favouring common sense over logic I guess
Well, it’s not a done deal yet. But it shows you how stupid it was to push this notion that we just needed some “moderate” Republicans to vote against Trump, that the whole thing is about voting against his decrepit personality, that basically nothing else was important…. Maybe they grabbed some people this way, but there was never a good reason to believe those Republican voters were also going to vote against all of Trump’s Republican comrades who wanted to be federal/state legislators, governors, etc. When you validate conservatives and conservatism, that’s what you get. Maybe next time, we shouldn’t concede everything to them, except for The-One-Bad-Dude Who-Must-Go.
Or perhaps it wasn’t such an absurd mistake, because this was more or less the plan all along: don’t stir things up too much in the election, do nothing with the power you’ve got, keep up the act for a few more years at least so you can rake in more donations. Still very stupid, but also more evil.
Biden will probably win PA, so at least that would pretty much rule out any faithless elector scenario.
Biden will clearly win the electoral college at this point. I have no doubt.
…but unfortunately, the election was always planned to go all the way to SCOTUS, again. the groundwork is already being laid by Trump’s lawyers in every contested state. at LEAST one of those states will allow him to set the necessary pins in motion for this to be appealed to SCOTUS.
it was inevitable, and predicted by Sanders, btw.
@consciousness razor, five million more people voted for Biden already than did for Clinton.
Unfortunately, the same surplus also showed up for Trump.
I personally do not see any evidence that a more progressive candidate (s) would beat Trump (Republicans) better. The USA just does not seem to be as progressive as some people would like it to be. Let’s face it -- most people in USA indeed are either right-of-center or downright fascist. The battle really is between centrist and fascists, because the left is non-existent except in a few select places.
Take Florida for example, where a sizable portion of Latinx population voted for a person who wants to criminalize their very existence. Americans are simply way too easily spooked by the “socialism” world, even those who rely on de-facto socialist policies (like bail-outs for farmers who were hit by Trums trade wars etc.).
No doubt these results will convince the Democrats they need to move further to the right, er, I mean “center” if they’re going to do better in future elections. Easier to do that than campaign finance reform, a new voting rights act, or getting rid of the electoral college.
This assumes the Latine people form a single group with shared interests. They are not. Cuban immigrants are in a very different place politically than immigrants from Central American countries.
@anat, my comment assumes nothing of the sort. That Cuban immigrants are in a different place politcally changes nothing about the fact thab by voting for Trump they voted for someone who wants to criminalize their very existence as immigrants.
The results in Missouri were worse than I’d feared. I was sad but not surprised by my governor and U.S. representative, but the passing of Amendment 3, 51-49, was shocking. The white supremacist theocrat party will now crank Gerymandering up to 11 because that’s what they do.
I fear that Biden will slow, but not be able to halt, our march toward third-world dictatorship.
(I should probably settle down, but I’m not quite ready yet.)
Charly, the Cubans want to criminalize the Central American immigrants. They expect to be included in the expanded category of whiteness in the US, and whatever immigration laws will not be applied equally to white people as to others. (Nothing in US politics makes sense except in the light of racism.)
@anat, yeah, they are those people voting for Leopard Eating People’s Faces party and expecting that the leopards won’t eat their faces.
Americans shoot themselves in the foot regularly when voting. Well, not only Americans, altough they excell at it more than anyone.
But political iimmigrants from Cuba voting for anti-immigration racist Trump is whole new level of stupid.
The Cuban population in Florida is simply participating in the favorite activity of every previous immigrant group in the US: Shutting the door behind them.
Charly, #9:
What I wrote was in response to someone who was dismayed by the outcomes of other races, particularly the house and senate. Let’s say Biden did get more than Clinton. Some percentage of that is coming from the anti-Trump Republicans I was talking about, but the point is that this doesn’t make them anti-Republican Republicans.
Look, when you put John Kasich on the stage to speak at the Democratic convention, you really can’t be surprised that some of your voters will support others like him. So did Biden get a bigger popular vote number? How does that make a difference? We don’t use that number here, and either way it doesn’t affect what I said.
You want evidence for a counterfactual? I personally do not see any evidence of what would have happened if JFK were not killed, but I don’t tend to make arguments out of things like that.
What I can tell you is that large numbers of people (sometimes 80% or more) support many of the policies that progressive activists/politicians have been promoting. So if we had made this election about policy and substance like that, I think it could’ve worked out just fine for us. But we won’t really know, as long as our only “left wing” party doesn’t take itself seriously and tries to ape the right-wing party.
You don’t live in the US, correct? I doubt you know as much about my own neighbors as I do, and I’m very sure it’s not of these “select places.” I know that I’m not non-existent, or at least I think so which is good enough for me.
Some Latinos are more conservative about abortion and so forth … not all, but some. You can thank Catholicism for that. They certainly don’t only care about immigration, particularly if they’re not recent immigrants which many are not.