Also, the “red team” has been actively helping expand voter access all over the country. The Republican Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican state legislature played a major role in expanding voter access in Georgia the last couple of years (obviously they’re the ones with the actual power to change the election laws): https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/vote...
> Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the increase in registered voters shows the success of automatic voter registration and highlights other ways election officials have improved voting access, such as absentee voting for anyone who requests a mailed ballot and three weeks of early voting.
If it were not for the pandemic I'm convinced the Trump turnout for this election would have produced results rivaling Reagan in 1984. Even with a pandemic he was able to drive more voters to the polls on election day than any point in American history.
Trump under-performed his 2016 margins in 38 states, including many deep red ones.
Trump is historically unpopular among people in the suburbs. Biden won my county by 15-20. It hadn’t voted Democrat before 2016. And Larry Hogan won my county by 38 points in 2018.
There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:
"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...
49.7% to 49.2% is a HELL of a lot closer than the D+6 projections I saw.
Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control.
The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.
My understanding is that Republicans were projected to lose even more seats this election - in the 10-20 range - and instead gained seats. So yeah, surprising.
I'm not entirely sure how Georgia's senate runoffs work.
> The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.
Well, maybe. PA still looks to be within 50k votes, and while it's possible that precanvassing would have allowed the election to be called on Tuesday night, the policy of accepting votes postmarked up to election night even if they arrived late would still leave things potentially up for grabs. And there's a LOT of close states this year. (And to answer "why", I believe it's to prevent vote counts from leaking before people actually go and vote)
The more general point that "If there was a blue wave, we wouldn't be worrying about states with margins of under 50k votes or talking about how control of the senate will be determined later" still stands.
That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.
> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night
It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.
“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.
This was high tide for conservative votes. [3]
[1] https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/11/04/old...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/20/a-wider-par...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille...
"If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again," Graham said Sunday on Fox News. "President Trump should not concede. We're down to less — 10,000 votes in Georgia. He's going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more — more votes to be counted."
https://thehill.com/homenews/525063-lindsey-graham-if-trump-...
Florida is likely a lost cause (between conservative minorities and the elderly), but you don’t need Florida to win national elections (clearly). If the electoral college is done away with, it’s also moot, as there is enough popular vote margin at the national level to always go blue.
And with Trump showing that it's possible to increase the Republican vote share among minorities... I'd expect political strategists to focus more effort there in the future. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.
Sorry my thesis wasn't clear, although I appreciate the opportunity to refine the message. Better to get the kinks out here before speaking to an audience IRL.
Losing a solid voter base might mean that the Republicans need to change their platform to appeal to more voters, but it doesn't mean that they're forever doomed and will never win another election. Maybe that means compromising on abortion. Maybe it means immigration reform - but from the Republican perspective, and not giving amnesty to illegal immigrants. (And funnily enough, IIRC amnesty isn't particularly popular among LEGAL immigrants) Maybe it means pulling their heads out of their asses re: climate change, and running on a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
All of this means changes, but not an end to the party.
As you said, neither party is going away, but they will both have to change to accommodate an evolving electorate. As someone said upthread, both parties need to stop taking their voters for granted and go out and listen to them.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/06/28/shifting-pub...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/08/29/u-s-public-c...
[3] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/03/21/retirement-social...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/03/most-contin...
> While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.
> It’s a similar story with younger Hispanic Americans, a group where Trump has also made gains. According to UCLA Nationscape’s polling, Trump is attracting 35 percent of Hispanic voters under age 45, up from the 22 percent who backed him four years ago in the CCES data.
UCLA polling in battleground states shows that Black voters 30-60 are three times more likely to trust congressional Republicans that Black voters over 60 (21% versus 8%). In the 18-29 group it’s almost four times (29%).
I won't comment on whether the US is red or blue or purple.
However, it's quite clear that the Trump administration specifically and the Republican party in general have been engaged in actively suppressing voters in general, and the democratic party's electorate in specific.
We're talking about an administration that, while fully aware that there was a disproportionate and significant amount of pro-Democratic party voters who depended on mail-in ballots to cast their vote, they did their best to:
* sabotage the USPS's ability to process and ship mail up to the election,
* enforce rules refusing to account for all mail-in ballots,
* and prop up their own electorate to vote in person to avoid the risk of their votes being filtered out by their sabotage campaign.
We're talking about a campaign designed to filter out votes to competing candidates, hoping to skew election results in your favor.
This is not how a party that values basic democratic values operates.
The financiers of the right are increasingly open about not wishing for a democracy in the US. The similarity here with the industrialists during the Weimar Republic is by the way striking.
What I see is 4 million more votes for Biden than Trump. In any other electoral system this would have been a rout.
No legal process has taken place that has declared Biden the winner.
He's been literally throwing lawsuits around to stop different states from continuing the counting. That to me says OP's words were accurate.
No electors have been selected yet.
Everything else that happens are formalities, however important and necessary. Other than the 2000 election, we haven't waited this long to announce the next president following a presidential election.
And it isn't even close, Biden has more differential votes by percentage than Nixon, Truman, or Reagan.
edit: so i've now been rate limited for posting three things. What the posters beyond assume is not what I meant. I'll not be able to answer for about two days or so. nice
Democracy was stress tested, and it still worked.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/2020-presidential-election-p... (Postal Service data shows poor mail-in ballot delivery rate in key swing states, judge suggests Postmaster General DeJoy might have to testify)
In Washington state where I used to live has had universal mail in ballots for many years and they had ballot drop boxes that were swept on election day. There was extensive information that was put out informing people of the last day they could mail their ballots in.
In PA this is under review by the state and US supreme court: https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/110620zr_g31...
Welcome to a crash course in civics.
Welcome to a crash course in reality.
All of the ballot-counting has been under the watch of observers on both sides of the aisle, including especially multiple Republican observers. Republican observers have confirmed that ballots that arrived after the deadline have either not been counted or have been counted separately from votes received on/by election day. If those segregated ballots were included in the count, Biden's lead would exceed 100k in PA.
The actual Republican partisans on the ground with actual knowledge of what's going on acknowledge that nothing illegal has happened in the PA vote count.
Your guy lost fair and square. Accept it and move on.
The late-arriving ballots were both physically segregated, and counted separately from the timely ballots by separate government employees, in pairs including one Democrat and one Republican. Before numbers are reported, the numbers in each batch are confirmed by employees locally and at the state level to make sure they match the number of ballots in that batch, and these numbers are reviewed by Democratic and Republican employees.
Segregated numbers have not been reported in this manner because the courts ordered them not to, so the numbers are kept separately and were not included in the official count. Because of the court order, most of the segregated ballots have not yet been counted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pennsylvania-ballots... (noting that Alito's order had no effect because that was what the ballot officials were already doing as a result of earlier state court orders.)
You could very easily just show me where these two separate counts are being recorded on the PA SOS website but you cannot because it does not exist.
Why not just admit that you're wrong?
I can say that Republican observers and lawyers on the ground in PA confirm that the official numbers do not include segregated numbers. If they did, Biden's lead wouldn't even be close. They would have called PA for Biden on Wednesday.
If you choose not to believe the GOP's own observers and lawyers, that's your choice, but I'm not going to indulge in your conspiracy fantasies.
The court order does not say that.
Why lie? Furthermore the SCOTUS order was required because the districts felt like they didn't have to comply with the state level order so even if your interpretation is correct you don't know how many of the counted ballots should have been segregated and not counted towards the official count in the first place.
From TFA: "It was unclear how much of an impact the order might have on Pennsylvania election boards, who Boockvar had previously ordered to segregate and separately count late-arriving ballots."
The state courts had already ordered ballot segregation prior to the ballots being counted.
Furthermore the SCOTUS order was required because the districts felt like they didn't have to comply with the state level order so even if your interpretation is correct you don't know how many of the counted ballots should have been segregated and not counted towards the official count in the first place.
This is simply false. As every news site noted, including Fox News, districts were already doing this because the PA supreme court said that ballots should be segregated.
And moreover, it was not a SCOTUS order. It was a Justice Alito order. The entire SCOTUS did not weigh in.
No, there are allegations of USPS workers coming forward from conspiracy boards. In truth, there were no such USPS workers testifying, or even claiming, any of that. Even FOX News and One America couldn't find any evidence supporting the existence of these supposed USPS workers.
And on another note: military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day since at least WWII. Are you saying that most of the military votes cast in the past 6 decades are fraudulent?
And on a final note: it hasn't been possible to backdate postdates for at least a decade, as the USPS records when mail is received separately and in addition to the postdate, and it isn't possible to backdate that data unless you have access to the USPS database. Considering that the USPS is run by a Trump appointee, it is very unlikely that Democrats have that sort of access.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D-2GOswwA
Fox News and One America refused to air these videos because they couldn't track down any of these supposed whistleblowers and in fact, Fox News said they couldn't find any proof that these supposed postal workers even exist.
Also, you do know that the USPS Postmaster is a huge Trump Supporter so any allegations of backdating involving the Postmaster would relate to backdating Republican ballots, not Democratic ballots? And in such case, Project Veritas has provided evidence of voter fraud by the current sitting president of the USPS.
Next time, you may want to think before you link.
False on both counts.
Falsifying and modifying evidence: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-woman-approa...
Moreover, military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day in nearly all states since at least WWII.
Washington allows ballots to be postmarked the day of the election: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/dates-and-deadlines.aspx
Utah allows ballots to be postmarked the day before the election, so long as they are received before noon of the day of the county canvass (generally, the day after the election but as late as ten days after the election, depending on the county). https://www.vote.org/utah/
(I have participated in election litigation in multiple states. I know more about election law than you do. You will not win this battle.)
Requiring signatures yet refusing to reject ballots for mismatched signatures isn't much of a requirement: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/pennsylvania-court-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/signature-...
The point of requiring signatures was never about preventing fraud, since it was never an issue historically. The requirements were issued in the 20th century to reject black votes, as at the time the requirements were passed, many black voters couldn't write.
I’m saying it being non-existent disqualifies claims that signatures on ballot envelopes prevent fraud.
The fake allegations of voter fraud and the extensive efforts to suppress votes will damage future elections. And the presidential election survived attacks, but the senate could be impacted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/07/re...
edit- spelling.
Bait him out with a cheeseburger !
Is this the model of government that the USA bomb other countries for?