Updated: November 6, 2020 10:05:50 am
Democratic presidential candidate Former Vice President Joe Biden, accompanied by Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, walks from the stage after speaking Wednesday, Nov.4, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware (AP).
At noon on Thursday in the United States (late in the afternoon in India), Joe Biden fell six Electoral College votes short of the magic number of 270 needed to win the White House.
President Donald Trump, with 56 short votes and on an increasingly narrow path to reelection, called for vote counts and to stop the counts, and filed lawsuits alleging voter fraud.
In scattered street protests in various cities across the country, protesters demanded that every vote be counted. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, about 150 Trump supporters, some of whom carried assault rifles, surrounded a facility where ballots were counted. There were protests in Minneapolis, Portland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
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All eyes were on the unannounced totals in the four crucial states of Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. A victory in any of these four states will push Biden over the edge.
Local Republican leaders submitted to what seemed like a sure opportunity for Biden. “I think it’s pretty clear that Biden is about to break that 270 magic. Whether it’s today or tomorrow or early next week, it’s still pretty clear,” said Christopher Nicholas, a veteran Republican strategist in Pennsylvania.
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While any expectation of a landslide for Biden was quickly disproved on election night, the Democratic candidate, by winning the popular vote, racked up the most votes of any candidate in a presidential election in modern American history. United. Democrats have now won the popular vote in seven of the eight most recent presidential elections, but have lost the Electoral College twice (Al Gore, 2000, and Hillary Clinton, 2016).
“Arguably the most exciting thing about this election is the massive turnout it inspired,” said Donald P Green, a political scientist and quantitative methodologist at Columbia University. Almost 67 percent of the electorate, more than 160 million Americans, voted.
The campaigns have spent more in this election than the last two presidential campaigns combined. “For decades, scholars have wondered if the United States would ever approach turnout in the 1960 elections; this one seems to have surpassed it, and others that date back to 1900. That is a rare achievement for a country famous for its low voter turnout rates, “Green said.
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After Trump scored big victories in Florida and Texas, Biden’s lead took off with a critical call for him in Arizona from right-leaning Fox News, which was questioned by the Trump campaign. The former vice president captured Wisconsin and Michigan late Wednesday (earlier Thursday in India), overturning the former Democratic strongholds that, along with Pennsylvania, had catapulted Trump to victory in 2016.
The Trump campaign called for a recount in Wisconsin and filed vote-recount demands in Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, signaling a protracted battle.
“We will go to the Supreme Court of the United States … We will win this and, as far as I am concerned, we have already won it,” Trump said at the White House late on election night. On Thursday, he posted tweets demanding, “STOP THE COUNTING!” And “STOP THE FRAUD!”
There is no legal route in the United States to send lawsuits directly to the Supreme Court; they would first have to go through the local courts. “So far, it does not appear that the Trump campaign has any legal claims that could have a significant effect on the outcome of the election,” said Corey Goldstone, communications director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
“(The lawsuits) look like an attempt to smear the integrity of the election without any real basis … Not surprisingly, (some) states take longer to finish counting all legally cast ballots by mail that arrived long before Election Day . At this point, it is important to be patient and let the process unfold to the end. All valid ballots must be counted and, once they are, we will meet the next president of the United States, ”said Goldstone.
Biden radiated confidence in impending success, but refrained from claiming victory prematurely. “Now, after a long night of counting, it is clear that we are winning enough states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. I am not here to declare that we have won, but I am here to report, when the count is over, we believe we will be the winners, ”he said in Delaware.
In favor of Biden is the fact that the votes to be counted in the undeclared states are not only coming from their urban and suburban bases, but are also predominantly Democratic ballots. As the counts continued in Georgia and Pennsylvania, Trump’s leads continued to shrink. Analysts estimate that the results for Nevada and Georgia will arrive later on Thursday (Friday in India).
There is already talk of the impending triumph and tribulations of a Biden administration. Joseph Cari, who served on the Biden campaign in 1988 and on the Al Gore campaign in 2000, said: “Our national nightmare is over, but we cannot govern because we will probably have a Republican Senate.”
The Republican Party has won enough seats to crush Democratic hopes of taking control of the Senate; Republicans have also improved their count in the House of Representatives. Biden, if he wins, will be the first Democrat since the late 1800s to rise to the presidency without control of Congress. “With a Republican Senate, if the administration wants to advance health issues, etc., the war is on. And that’s the first thing Biden wants to tackle, ”Cari said.
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Nicholas, the Pennsylvania Republican strategist, said: “I don’t think anyone had on their menu this year that we would lose the presidency, occupy the Senate and win in the House. There are a lot of Democratic groups scratching their heads about why they have Biden in the White House, but they didn’t move the needle in Congress. “
The disparate victories symbolize the country’s persistent divisions, some of which have deepened. The unprecedented turnout drove even deeper trenches between urban voters for Democrats and rural voters for Republicans. According to the public opinion polling company Public Opinion Strategies, Biden won among white voters with no college education who had dropped out of Clinton, but not among white voters with college education. However, white women crossed from Trump to Biden. Republicans made small strides with voters of color.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday: “I think we are very aware of the challenges that we have in the suburbs of America. The other thing that has really been a Republican challenge for several years and particularly in recent years is the gender gap. “
Public Opinion Strategies found that late decision-makers broke heavily with Trump. Nearly 20 percent of Trump voters said they kept their support for the president a secret from most of their friends, while only 8 percent of Biden voters said the same, indicating a possible reason for the faulty surveys.
When asked about national divisions, Shekar Narasimhan, president of the AAPI Victory Fund, said: “Joe Biden is a healer and unifier, and that’s what it takes. They (the Republicans) failed again. Our solution was that Joe Biden was the perfect candidate to rebuild the blue wall (the Midwest) and that is what he has done. In addition, it opened new states that were not in dispute (like Arizona). “
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