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An election season defined by anxiety appears likely to drag on for another few nerve-racking days. How fitting.
The resounding, across-the-board victory that Democrats had hoped they might see last night — encouraged by their strong showing in the 2018 midterms, and yet another year of overly favorable polls — never materialized.
At the same time, what at first blush may have seemed as if it was shaping up to be a surprisingly robust Republican showing was actually much less certain. The first ballots to be counted in many states were those cast on Election Day, giving an illusion of Republican mega-strength that will probably erode across the board as more mail-in ballots are counted.
And so now, we wait.
Of course, that’s not what President Trump wants us to do. He got onstage at the White House around 2:30 a.m. and unleashed an attack on the country’s very democratic institutions.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” he said, falsely claiming that the early returns gave him an insurmountable lead and baselessly calling the vote-counting process “a fraud on the American people.” He declared — alarmingly — that he intended to bring his complaints to the Supreme Court, with its newly strengthened conservative majority, and ask it to stop counting ballots.
“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, OK? It’s a very sad moment.”
Joe Biden appeared to see this coming — and indeed, Democrats had worried about such a scenario occurring in a tight race. By the time Trump spoke, Biden had already pre-empted the president, giving his own remarks over an hour earlier at a drive-in event in Wilmington, Del. In a brief address, partly off the cuff but mostly off a teleprompter, Biden declared himself optimistic and insisted that every vote must count.
“I’m here to tell you tonight, we believe we’re on track to win this election,” he said. “We knew because of the unprecedented early vote and the mail-in vote, it was going to take a while. We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying the votes is finished. And it ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted.”
Republicans yesterday did win closely contested Senate races in at least two states, Alabama and Iowa, and flipped at least six House seats, giving them a four-seat net gain in that chamber so far.
But Democrats also picked up two Senate seats, in Colorado and Arizona, and close races remain uncalled in North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Maine — most of them potential Democratic pickups. The party’s path to a Senate majority may have narrowed somewhat, but the fate of the chamber, it’s safe to say, still hangs in the balance.
Where we’re at
Based on the states that have already been declared, Biden needs 43 more electoral votes to get to the golden number of 270, and Trump needs 57.
The three Northern states that flipped for Trump in 2016 — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — remain uncalled. So do North Carolina and Georgia, both of which went for him in 2016 but have been heavily targeted by Democrats this cycle, and both of which are double-whammies: They have contested Senate races hitched to the presidential contest.
In many of these still-uncalled states, Trump holds the lead in terms of ballots counted — but that could easily change as more mail-in ballots and some in-person votes continue to be tabulated.
In Georgia, as Biden mentioned in his speech, Democrats are feeling bullish. Many more votes are yet to come in from the Atlanta area; in DeKalb County, for instance, one of the state’s largest, early in-person votes had not even begun to be counted until last night.
In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, votes were not allowed to be counted until yesterday morning, so it could take at least another day for all ballots to be tabulated.
When exit polls disagree
One lesson that we learned — well, relearned — last night is that polls cannot be trusted to predict the outcome of an election. Prepare yourself for a lot of articles about this fact.
Yet another reminder of this verity arrived via the exit polls, when two separate voter surveys yesterday showed some widely diverging results.
The traditional exit polls, conducted by Edison Research on behalf of a consortium of news organizations, showed that Trump was neck and neck with Biden among white college graduates, including a virtual tie among white women with college degrees. This was in defiance of almost every major poll before the election.
The Associated Press and NORC’s new, ambitious, 140,000-interview voter survey, VoteCast, had results that were more in line with expectations: Biden was ahead among white women with college educations by more than 20 points, even as Trump managed to pull closer to even with him among white college men.
This was only one of many points of departure between the traditional exit polls, which tended to show results slightly more favorable to Trump across the board, and the new A.P./NORC study.
As you get ready for a season full of polling takes, expect these voter surveys to be a major focus of discussion and hand-wringing.
Photo of the day
Fox News played on the television at Joyce’s Tavern in Staten Island, N.Y.
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