Waking up to uncertainty [UPDATED]

UPDATE: Decision Desk HQ is one of the many news sites that follow the elections with their own analysts and call state results. They are the first to state that they think Joe Biden is the president.

While I am repeating their claim, it should be treated with great caution because the AP, the one that I most rely on, has made no such call, and neither have Fox News, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.]

Waking up in the morning these days is an exercise in anticipation and dread. Being on the west coast, I know that a lot of stuff has already happened by the time I wake up so I turn on the news with some degree of apprehension.

I went to bed Tuesday night fearing that I would wake up on Wednesday to the news that Trump had won the election. But Wednesday morning produced no such news which was a relief, though the election was still not called. The fact that Arizona (which went for Trump in 2016) had been awarded by AP to Biden during the night meant that he had 264 electoral votes and needed only Nevada, where he was leading and which Democrats had won in 2016, to get to the target of 270 EVs.
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Trump’s loss poses dangers to the pandemic

If and when Trump is declared the loser of the election, I fear for what will happen with the covid-19 situation. Yesterday saw yet another new daily record of 116,255 new cases. Daily deaths again broke the 1,000 mark with 1,124 and the seven-day average of deaths also rose to 869.

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Meyers and Colbert on the election aftermath

Breaking all the norms for his own benefit as usual, Trump held his ‘victory party’ on Tuesday night in the East Room of the White House, which is not supposed to be used for partisan activities. Wednesday evening both Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert discussed the election results so far and had clips about Trump’s weird remarks to his supporters in the White House on election night. [As an aside, I am always captivated by Trump’s weird hand gestures when he talks.]

Here is Meyers. At the 18:20 mark, he shows a clip of Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster with an outfit called the Trafalgar Group, who asserts without evidence that Pennsylvania has a long history of systemic voter fraud that will steal the election away from Trump. That part is at the 18:20 minute mark.


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Trump’s behavior with women is utterly disgusting

Yes, yes, I know this is old news but we need to remind ourselves that Trump is not just your run-of-the-mill ordinary creep, he is a predator. On the excellent radio program This American Life this week, we hear another example of this. Writer E. Jean Carroll talked with an old friend of hers named Jessica Leeds about what the latter experienced at the hands (literally) of Donald Trump when she was a young woman. Leeds was one of the first women to accuse Trump of sexual assault in 2016.
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The legal state of play after the election

As was to be expected, Trump is doing everything that he can to raise suspicions about the election process in an effort to reverse the results in those states that he has lost and those he fears he might further lose. The chief weapon in his arsenal is the legal process and already new lawsuits have been filed to add to those that were filed even before election day.

Post-election litigation is normal. Lawsuits are always filed on election day and the days after in response to issues such as equipment malfunctions, printing errors and polls not opening on time.

Usually, they receive little attention. This year, they are under more intense scrutiny because the president has spent the year making frequent, baseless claims about election fraud.

For one of these routine cases to affect the outcome of the election, the ballots being contested would need to be both (a) big enough in number to determine the state’s result (for example, a suit which concerns 50,000 votes in a state a candidate won by 30,000 votes) and (b) in a state decisive for the election result.

As of Wednesday evening, election law experts said none of the lawsuits filed appeared to meet both these qualifications. “These case don’t seem to be very strong, they also don’t seem to be significant as a matter of votes,” said Paul Smith, vice-president for litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center.

That could change as counting continues.

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Let the Trump shenanigans begin!

If you heard a rushing wind earlier today, that was the sound of almost the entire world all at once exhaling a sigh of relief when it began to look as if Donald Trump was going down to defeat. Late last night things did not look good at all and I for one feared the worst when I went to sleep.

It looks like Joe Biden will eke out at least a narrow win in the electoral college in addition to winning the national popular vote by almost three million. The states of Arizona and Nevada where he is leading now will give him the 270 votes he needs. The electoral vote margin may get larger depending on how Pennsylvania (20) goes, and could become quite large in the unlikely event that Georgia (16) and North Carolina (15) also go for him. So basically, depending on how these last three states go, Biden could be anywhere from 270 to 321, with Trump ranging from 217 to 268 since Alaska’s three votes will very likely go to Trump.
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Well, here we are in limbo

[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.
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Trump goes after … Lady Gaga?

Even on the eve of the election, Trump can’t resist getting distracted and going off message by attacking random people in his closing rallies. This time it was Lady Gaga who had appeared with Joe Biden earlier in the day.

Trump made fun of her name but he could also have drawn attention to her footwear. It is impressive that she can walk on those.