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As vote counting continued in various states on Wednesday, these key takeaways emerged from the 2020 U.S. elections:
Biden believes that victory is in the hands
Joe Biden’s campaign said the Democratic challenger was on his way to victory in the presidential race. The electoral map and ongoing vote counts that were cast early, but counted last, due to Republican-imposed rules, supported the claim. The clearest path to victory for Biden appeared to be a victory in the Great Lakes states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But the campaign was also leading in Georgia, where a victory would be devastating for Trump.
Trump does it too (but much more difficult)
Donald Trump’s campaign also said they had a way to win, anticipating a recount request in Wisconsin, a legal fight in Nevada and other potential challenges to the outcome. Trump could also be boosted by a Pennsylvania victory. But those methods seemed like a long shot compared to Biden’s growing voting margin. Trump, for his part, was doing everything he could to cancel the vote, undermine the count and declare himself the winner on Twitter, but prominent Republicans did not immediately join him on his mission. However, the road ahead seemed complicated and the president of the United States, speaking from inside the White House, took the unprecedented step of calling for a halt in the elections on election night.
Unclear result day
A presidential result was not expected on Wednesday and perhaps not until Friday. Election officials in Philadelphia, a Democratic city expected to provide hundreds of thousands of votes for Biden, announced that their count will not be completed on Wednesday. As Trump ranted on Twitter, Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said: “We think we are on a clear path to victory by this afternoon, we hope the vice president has clues in states that put him above the 270 electoral votes “. today.”
Voters came out
The participation was massive. Biden won more votes than any candidate for the presidency, with a tally close to 70 million, and Trump won the third-highest number of votes in history, with only Barack Obama in his 2008 candidacy among them. Biden was on track to win the popular vote by millions of votes, although his victory was less than the double-digit margins that commonly appear in polls.
The polls were far away
Polls in general proved to be wildly misleading, overestimating Biden’s strength in state after state, even more than they overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength in 2016. Top pollsters missed the mark in many places by high single digits. and the more granular district-level surveys were even further away. While survey analysts came to accurate conclusions after 2016 about what was broken and how to fix it, it was unclear how the company could be saved from surveys this time. In Wisconsin, many polls were 10 points and in Florida 8 points. Elsewhere, especially Georgia, where polls saw a possible Biden victory, the polls seemed a bit more accurate.
Democrats fade on the ballot
Democrats were largely disappointed by the election against, with their dreams of a Senate majority hanging by a thread. They retained their majority in the House of Representatives, but managed to lose some seats. They seemed to capture some legislatures, like in Michigan, while elsewhere they were thought to have a chance of winning, like in Texas. It was an election in which it is difficult to characterize a mosaic of national results that saw dazzling Democratic advances in places like Arizona and possibly Georgia, but setbacks elsewhere and a clear failure to consolidate the blue wave of 2018. Progressives further regretted the Trump’s obvious electoral strength, and they wondered how to combat Trumpism in the future while crafting an appeal to their voters, which included a healthy minority of Hispanic voters from different backgrounds. Trump beat white voters by 15 points, according to exit polls, his same margin as 2016.
