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Good Morning,
The more ballots that are counted, the closer Joe Biden seems to be to the US presidency. And boy, there are many ballots to count. Biden has already received more votes than any other candidate in history, with more than 72.1 million of Donald Trump’s 68.6 million, which seems increasingly likely to be reflected in the electoral college. “When the count is over,” Biden said Wednesday, “we think we will be the winners.”
Trump has sued to stop the counts on Three battle states, called for a recount in another and vowed to take the election all the way to the United States Supreme Court, despite little evidence that such legal action will have any influence on the outcome. Meanwhile, progressive groups have taken to the streets in American cities to demand that every vote be counted.
Now Biden is projected to win Wisconsin and Michigan by a wider margin than Trump in 2016; To beat him, Trump would have to win the four states that have yet to be called: Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where the count is expected to continue until at least Friday. Of the four, only North Carolina seems like a safe bet for the president.
However, Biden’s lead is shrinking in Arizona, where Democratic celebrations of a rare victory may still prove premature. In Phoenix, pro-Trump protesters arrived at a polling station during the count, some of them carrying weapons, others carrying placards alleging voter fraud.
If Biden wins, and even if Trump ultimately accepts the result, Corey Brettschneider says the 2020 elections showed that American democracy was dangerously unstable. It has been more than three decades since a presidential race ended in a genuine landslide, and the United States remains an evenly and bitterly divided nation:
It’s a small consolation that Americans understood the threat Trump posed and flocked to vote against him in record numbers. Yet as this election depressingly revealed, there was almost the same and opposite reaction from Trump’s rank and file.
Trump may have lost, but Trumpism lives on
Why didn’t the Americans turn overwhelmingly against Trump after four years of turmoil? Maybe it was the economy, stupid. Exit polls suggest that voters were more concerned about the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic than the coronavirus itself, and the president’s handling of the economy has proven to be consistently popular throughout his career. mandate.
Biden might have accomplished the rare feat of toppling a sitting president, but the results suggest that Trump’s 2016 victory was no fluke, writes David Smith, and that means Trumpism is here to stay. As Chris McGreal reports, Democrats failed to make headway in the heartlands of rural areas, and their disappointments in negative votes likely herald a legislative stalemate under Biden’s presidency.
Could the president’s false claims of victory take root?
The Biden campaign called Trump’s false claims of the election victory Wednesday morning “outrageous.” His former aide John Bolton called the president’s comments “a disgrace.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described them as “dangerous and authoritarian.” And international observers say the election has been “marred” by Trump’s “unprecedented attempts to undermine public confidence.”
Facebook and Twitter have taken emergency measures to counter the president’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud and premature claims of victory. But while your misinformation is well suited to a certain mindset, writes Julia Carrie Wong, it may not succeed in the way you hope.
In other election news …
Statistics of the day
Before the election, polling aggregator Real Clear Politics showed Trump leading Biden in Ohio by just one point. He ended up winning by more than eight. Forecasting site FiveThirtyEight had Biden ahead in Florida by 2.5 points; lost by 3.4. Whoever wins the White House, pollsters have lost again. Guardian US data editor Mona Chalabi explains the lessons that were not learned from the last time (or the one before):
Journalists will continue to create graphics that predict future presidents as long as readers continue to demand them. I don’t know how many times polls have to be wrong or how wrong they have to be for us to finally get away from the dangerous lure of predicting political outcomes.
Don’t miss this
Under the Republican Party’s 2010 Redmap strategy, Republicans seized control of several changing state legislatures, allowing them to redraw nearly five times as many Congressional districts nationwide than Democrats. Attempts by Democrats to reverse that trend in 2020, and thus influence the maps that will define the electoral situation for the next decade, have failed to fulfill their ambitions, as David Daley reports.
Last thing: Jacinda has faith in America’s democracy (even if you don’t)
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has lived in the US, has intervened in the elections weeks after winning a second term herself, saying she has “faith in America’s institutions” and “faith in which those final votes will continue to count. ”On the other hand, he also said:“ New Zealand feels like an oasis of calm in a chaotic and difficult world ”.
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