Who will bell the cat?

Once AP made the call that Joe Biden had passed the 270 electoral vote threshold, other news outlets like CNN and the New York Times and even Fox News quickly followed suit. AP soon after that called Nevada for Biden, giving him 290 EVs. If he also wins Georgia, and assuming that Trump holds on to North Carolina and Alaska, the final margin will be 306-232, a fitting bookend to Trump’s miserable presidency, since that was the same margin by which he won in 2016, that he of course labeled as a landslide victory, lying that it was one of the biggest in US history.
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Joe Biden declared the president

The Associated Press has declared that Joe Biden has won Pennsylvania and the presidency.

Meanwhile, Trump is playing golf at his golf course in Virginia while his lawyers are holding a press conference at (wait for it) a landscaping company in Philadelphia.

We should not be too hard on the pollsters

As in 2016, the final results of the presidential election had Donald Trump massively over performing when compared to the expectations based on the results of almost all the major polling outfits. There will be a temptation to beat up on the pollsters who got it so wrong and we can expect Nate Silver and others to be relentless grilled as to why the polls were so off. The ire aimed at them may be less this time because the final outcome of a likely Biden win is looking like it will be correct, unlike in 2016 where the prediction was of a Clinton win. But there will, and should be, much soul-searching as to why the polls were so off again.
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Trump’s speech yesterday, for the record

I usually try to avoid listening to Trump’s speeches but there was so much consternation at the vast number of lies in a speech he gave at a press conference yesterday that I felt obliged to watch it in its entirety. He delivered the written remarks in that weirdly flat monotone he uses when he is reading a script. It was pretty bad. Daniel Dale, who has been assigned the thankless task of fact-checking Donald Trump for CNN, lists all the lies in that short speech, that he called the most dishonest speech of his presidency, which is clearing a very high bar. (One thing that struck me is that Trump referred to ‘Mr. Biden’ and ‘Joe’ and did not use the usual insulting ‘Sleepy Joe’. But that was the only positive thing I heard.)
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Decision Desk HQ says that Joe Biden is president

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 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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