President-elect Joe Biden’s win count approaches a record 80 million votes as Democratic strongholds continue to count ballots and the 2020 election smashes turnout records.
Biden has already set a record for the most votes for a winning presidential candidate, and President Donald Trump has also set a record for the most votes for a losing candidate. With more than 155 million votes counted and California and New York still counting, turnout is 65% of all eligible voters, the highest since 1908, according to data from The Associated Press and the US Electoral Project.
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Biden’s rising tally and his leadership in the popular vote, nearly 6 million votes, come as Trump has escalated his false insistence that he actually won the election, and his campaign and supporters escalate their uphill legal fight to stop or delay certification of results, potentially. override the votes of Americans.
“There is a lot of noise, because Donald Trump is a bull carrying his own china shop,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University. “Once the noise subsides, it will be clear that Biden won a very convincing victory.”
Biden currently has an Electoral College lead of 290-232. But that doesn’t include voters in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points as officials perform a manual count. The AP hasn’t called the race, but if Biden’s leadership holds, he will win the Electoral College with a vote of 306-232, the identical margin that Trump won in 2016. At the time, Trump described it as a “landslide. “.
Trump sealed that victory with 77,000 votes in three battleground states, while Biden’s margin would be slightly narrower, around 45,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
Yet that slimmer win remains decisive by election law standards, says Rick Hasen, a University of Irvine professor and voting expert.
While Biden’s margins in states like Arizona and Wisconsin seem small (between 12,000 and 20,000 votes), those contests are not narrow enough to consider that they are likely to go through a recount or lawsuits. Counts generally change the total votes by just a few hundred votes. In 2000, Florida’s recount and the legal battle for the White House were motivated by a 537-vote margin.
“If you talk about being close enough to be within what we in the field call the litigation margin, this is not within the litigation margin,” Hasen said.
Timothy Naftali, a New York University presidential historian, has compared Biden’s still-growing popular vote and Electoral College margins to those of all the winners of a presidential election since 1960. His finding: Biden’s victory was just right. in the middle, tighter than landslides like Barack Obama’s 2008 victory or Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984, but broader than Trump’s 2016 victory or either of George W. Bush’s two victories.
The closest analogy was the reelection of Obama, who won by about the same margin that Biden has now.
“Did anyone think 2012 was a narrow win? No, ”Naftali said.
Despite that, Trump and his allies continue to try to stop certification of the election, in a risky attempt to deny states the ability to include voters who support Biden. These efforts are highly unlikely to be successful, but they reached a new tone this week when two Republican members of the canvassing board in Michigan’s largest county managed to block the certification of votes there Tuesday night. They allowed the certification to proceed after a protest, but it was a sign of how deeply Trump’s unfounded claims of massive fraud have penetrated.
In fact, argued Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who tracks vote counts for the U.S. Elections Project, Biden’s relatively narrow victories in the battlefield states tell a different story than that. that the president is promoting.
Democrats worry that the gap between the popular vote and Electoral College counts is growing as Democratic voters flock to the shores and out of battle states. That dynamic could make it difficult for Democrats to win congressional elections, creating a lasting disadvantage when it comes to promoting policy.
“If there is anything in the data here, it reveals how the system is against Democrats, not against Trump,” McDonald said.
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