NYT had 3 election needles that they felt were important enough to the election to document. As of right now, Trump is in the 85-95% range to win all 3.
So far, this clearly isn't the Biden blowout we were so often told.
Everything above the Mason-Dixon line still looks good for Biden, but none of the extra knock-out blows like FL, GA or NC seem to be materializing. Biden may still win OH, which was barely being discussed. But this is too close. Far too close.
Everything above the Mason-Dixon line still looks good for Biden, but none of the extra knock-out blows like FL, GA or NC seem to be materializing. Biden may still win OH, which was barely being discussed. But this is too close. Far too close.
That leaves room for his nonsense lawsuits and the rigged supreme court to steal the election.
CNN panel saying that it was a 'pipe dream' for Democrat analysts to say that this election was to be a 'landslide'. Then what is the point of polls if they are going to be consistently wrong.
There's some interesting biasing in the needle. So it's all not a forgone conclusion
That said - I do think Trump is probably going to win FL, NC and GA. I said in the last page or so that I wouldnt be surprised if he did.
I think the most important moment moving forward is the race in Ohio. I fully expect Trump to also win Ohio, but he won it by like 9 points in 2016. If he only wins is by 5 or 4 - then you would expect to see some kind of shift towards Biden in WI, MI and PA. That trend may be enough to push him over the line.
Two things are all but certain at this point though:
A - It's not going to be a fast night. We wont know who won until PA comes in in 3 or so days
B - The Democrats arent going to have the Senate after tonight. With Cunningham running behind Biden in NC, it doesnt look likely. Montana and Kansas are now the pivotal 4th seat flip the Democrats need, and neither are likely to happen.
One notable piece of progress is we now have our second transgender state senator--not in the federal Senate, but in the Delaware state senate. Sarah McBride has won her election campaign.
Hedging bets already. I suppose the question we should be asking is if the polls were "wrong" or "very, very wrong".
It is still anyone's race, but these earlier predictions are already looking a little silly.
Might be worth following one's own advice here. Much of the vote remains to be counted, these close states may take awhile to call. Even with Trump's relatively good performance in Florida, it's still possible we see a final popular vote margin of around 6% or so. This is only close because of the EC.
This might actually come down to the one electoral vote in Omaha. Fuck me. Biden seems poised to pick up Arizona. If he loses PA, but gains WI and MI, it is 269-269.
On the one hand, alot of this OVERWHELMING anxiety liberals have right now (and have had) is over not getting any of the early knockout blows in the south. The fight is going to distance, and even if Biden does hold onto to PA (which has been too close for comfort the whole time), the result may get, to put it in boxing parlance, thrown to the judges. This is nauseating. Not metaphorically, alot of us feel physically sick at the moment.
It's entirely possible that not even being directly responsible for mass death (which is as we speak, despite the election, kicking into overdrive) is enough to move the needle in this system. This is a dark, dark time whether Biden pulls this out or not. I can probably deal with Trump being in office. I don't know if I can deal with this many fellow citizens being ok with what is happening right now.
As for the Electoral College, what percentage of Americans do you think even KNOW that Nebraska has one electoral vote that is spilt from the rest of the state?? I'll bet you anything it's less than 10%.
FOX News has now called Arizona for Biden, which only took about 90 minutes. Trump now probably has to win Michigan or Wisconsin AND Pennsylvania. Omaha is looking pretty strong given Biden's strength in the northern urban areas.
The three relevant states are NOT going to report fully tonight. If you want to go to bed, you might as well.
This might actually come down to the one electoral vote in Omaha. Fuck me. Biden seems poised to pick up Arizona. If he loses PA, but gains WI and MI, it is 269-269.
On the one hand, alot of this OVERWHELMING anxiety liberals have right now (and have had) is over not getting any of the early knockout blows in the south. The fight is going to distance, and even if Biden does hold onto to PA (which has been too close for comfort the whole time), the result may get, to put it in boxing parlance, thrown to the judges. This is nauseating. Not metaphorically, alot of us feel physically sick at the moment.
Arizona called for Biden by some outlets. So that's great news. He just has to win the CD in Maine *or* Omaha. And, as I said earlier, NH returned a very favorable result. Which might bode well for the Maine CD. And frankly I think NH bodes well for PA too (along with cutting down Clinton's deficit in Ohio).
We aren't going to get a result tonight tonight tho folks. So just posting this as a general PSA too.
This means that the same three nightmare states from 2016 simply will not be project-able tonight. So, if you're staying up late just in the hopes of knowing who won -- don't!
I'm not sure how the math works out for the democrats. They hold the house but could still lose?
"he House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately after the counting of the electoral votes to vote for president if no candidate for the office receives a majority of the electoral votes. In this event, the House is limited to choosing from among the three candidates who received the most electoral votes. Each state delegation votes en bloc, with each state having a single vote. A candidate is required to receive an absolute majority of state delegation votes (currently 26 votes) in order for that candidate to become the president-elect. The House continues balloting until it elects a president. As a consequence of the state delegation voting method, the party that holds the majority in the House could still lose the contingent election if the minority party holds the majority of state delegations."
I'm not sure how the math works out for the democrats. They hold the house but could still lose.
"he House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately after the counting of the electoral votes to vote for president if no candidate for the office receives a majority of the electoral votes. In this event, the House is limited to choosing from among the three candidates who received the most electoral votes. Each state delegation votes en bloc, with each state having a single vote. A candidate is required to receive an absolute majority of state delegation votes (currently 26 votes) in order for that candidate to become the president-elect. The House continues balloting until it elects a president. As a consequence of the state delegation voting method, the party that holds the majority in the House could still lose the contingent election if the minority party holds the majority of state delegations."
Unless Republican House members break rank, Trump would win. It's by state delegation. And Republicans hold a large edge there. There's a part of me that would be fascinated to see this especially if Biden ended up with like a 5%+ popular vote margin.
Texas is probably going to go to Trump; there's only so much room for a turnaround with 75% already in. Still amazed at how purple we turned out, but those votes won't translate into political power because of the electoral college. Trump will be rewarded with the same EC votes even if he's become much less popular here since 2016.
Seeing Texas turn purple, but not enough to change all 38 red votes into 38 blue votes, reminds me that MY vote for president has been erased by the Electoral College for my entire life.
I don't know how I'll be able to rest with so much uncertainty. So much depends on the quirks of our electoral system. We might not know for days.
We don't even know if every vote will be counted yet. Trump has often spoken of the need to know results by Election Night, and Kavanaugh apparently believes it's okay to stop counting votes to win an election.
Both campaigns have marshaled lawyers for a protracted legal battle. Our next administration could be determined by court proceedings instead of a majority vote.
AZ is probably Biden (called by some). He's up pretty reasonably in NE02. Based on partial results that we currently have, it looks like Biden might be underperforming his polls by 2 or 3 points nationwide (which when added with a dramatic underperforming of Cuban Americans pushed Florida strongly to Trump).
Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are not going to be reporting all results, and the results in the upper midwest that are not being reported are mostly Absentee ballots which we know to be somewhat Biden favored.
If the above is correct, we might expect to see Biden win PA by 1 or 2 points, and MI/WI by a little more than that. That still leads to a Biden presidency.
The big holes in that argument are that Ohio went from looking plausibly good to pretty bad for Biden in a hurry. It's not clear what part of the vote is outstanding there, but he's down like 7 or 8 points, which is only very marginally better than Clinton did in 2016.
I think a lot of the doom and gloom here was weirdly predictable and yet still shocking. Trump overperformed the polls by 2 or 3 points, which hands him NC/GA. There was a big miss in Florida, which was the first really fully reported battleground state tonight - and we've got the "red mirage" effect in the upper midwest where we knew the last votes tallied were going to be the mail in ballots.
Really - this looks and feels a lot like 2018 in how the night started poorly. The chief difference is that it's closer than 2018 was, as well as forcing us to wait until tomorrow or later in the week for full results.
If I'm understanding this correctly, this basically means that Biden's national average in counties that have completely and totally reported right now is roughly something like a 5% national lead (Clinton won by 2% in margin, and if Biden is up another 1.5, that's 5% total).
National polls had the race somewhere between 7-8 points generally. That's roughly consistent then with a 2 or 3 point swing to Trump, which would be enough to hand him NC/GA (and Florida, as discussed, is an outlier a bit).
It wouldnt be enough to stop PA, WI, MI from going to Biden - if he keeps that margin (which is not for sure)
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The NYT needle is now showing a very minor trend to Biden and he's favored. It's all over the place.
Senate may still be up for grabs. Democrats needed to flip four seats assuming Jones loses in Alabama and he did. They've been projected to win two so far, in Arizona and Colorado. (Assuming winning the prez too).
They lost their shot in North Carolina it seems. Maine is still undecided. Montana is still undecided. Then there's also the two Georgia races going to a runoff. So a strong majority ain't gonna happen but a narrow one is still in the cards.
Senate may still be up for grabs. Democrats needed to flip four seats assuming Jones loses in Alabama and he did. They've been projected to win two so far, in Arizona and Colorado. (Assuming winning the prez too).
They lost their shot in North Carolina it seems. Maine is still undecided. Montana is still undecided. Then there's also the two Georgia races going to a runoff. So a strong majority ain't gonna happen but a narrow one is still in the cards.
For some reason, I didnt understand that the Purdue/Ossof race could go to a runoff. I knew the Warnock/Collins/Loefller could - but not the other one.
That is important. Bullock is also running well ahead of Biden in Montana. I'm guessing it wont be enough, but there's an outside chance he'll come through. How wild would it be to have two senators from Montana in the US senate?
Biden is going to win the popular vote by the margin I have been quoting for years, which is 5 million. The idea that those 5 million of us are captive to this game of Risk we call an electoral system is just soul-crushing.
One notable piece of progress is we now have our second transgender state senator--not in the federal Senate, but in the Delaware state senate. Sarah McBride has won her election campaign.
EDIT: Second, not first!
Not so much where I live. WA state house candidate Sherae Lascelles (non-binary) loses their race, with incumbent straight white guy Frank Chopp up 67-33 in election night results. It might narrow some (it was about 50-30 in the primary), but with 72% of registered voters already counted county-wide, that's an insurmountable lead. I'm kind of surprised to see the third-candidate voters breaking so heavily to the incumbent, but that might be the power of running as a Democrat instead of a minor party label.
The other two seats in the district remain held by a lesbian and a gay man. (WA uses districts that each have two state house seats with two-year terms and one state senate seat with a four-year term)
Uhh - what? Unless I'm blind both that website and the NYT results show Biden up in VA still. By a few points, too. Where is he on track to lose?
Edit - NYT now shows him slightly behind, but their numbers appear to be behind your source's numbers - and those still look like a clear Biden victory.
Second Edit - Fox is thinking of changing their call on Arizona. Sounds like it'll be a close finish. That's a really (REALLY) big deal. Biden winning Arizona gave him a super plausible path to the presidency by way of WI/MI and NE02.
Biden just got a massive surge in GA, and now he's a slight favorite there. This is just fucking exhausting.
Could be good news! Georgia may be call-able tonight. Won't technically project Biden as an EC winner. But obviously most us can make the right educated guess.
Honestly, if Trump manages to win the electoral vote but fails to win the popular vote, I won't consider the United States federal government a legitimate regime. I'm not ashamed to admit that in advance. The entire premise of democracy is majority rule, and the fact that the EC creates a corrupt feedback loop (it gives power to certain states, who use it to preserve the EC) to stay in place doesn't make minority rule legitimate.
I accepted Trump's victory as legitimate last time, but when I think about the past 4 years, that policy was strictly out of custom and tradition; not right or wrong. I do not believe the majority of Americans have to live by the rule of a government they did not elect. The people are not there to serve the law; the law is there to serve the people.
And yes, I'll do the same thing if Biden wins the EC but loses the popular vote.
Comments
So far, this clearly isn't the Biden blowout we were so often told.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/forecast-president.html
That leaves room for his nonsense lawsuits and the rigged supreme court to steal the election.
There's some interesting biasing in the needle. So it's all not a forgone conclusion
That said - I do think Trump is probably going to win FL, NC and GA. I said in the last page or so that I wouldnt be surprised if he did.
I think the most important moment moving forward is the race in Ohio. I fully expect Trump to also win Ohio, but he won it by like 9 points in 2016. If he only wins is by 5 or 4 - then you would expect to see some kind of shift towards Biden in WI, MI and PA. That trend may be enough to push him over the line.
Two things are all but certain at this point though:
A - It's not going to be a fast night. We wont know who won until PA comes in in 3 or so days
B - The Democrats arent going to have the Senate after tonight. With Cunningham running behind Biden in NC, it doesnt look likely. Montana and Kansas are now the pivotal 4th seat flip the Democrats need, and neither are likely to happen.
EDIT: Second, not first!
It is still anyones race, but these earlier predictions are already looking a little silly.
Might be worth following one's own advice here. Much of the vote remains to be counted, these close states may take awhile to call. Even with Trump's relatively good performance in Florida, it's still possible we see a final popular vote margin of around 6% or so. This is only close because of the EC.
On the one hand, alot of this OVERWHELMING anxiety liberals have right now (and have had) is over not getting any of the early knockout blows in the south. The fight is going to distance, and even if Biden does hold onto to PA (which has been too close for comfort the whole time), the result may get, to put it in boxing parlance, thrown to the judges. This is nauseating. Not metaphorically, alot of us feel physically sick at the moment.
As for the Electoral College, what percentage of Americans do you think even KNOW that Nebraska has one electoral vote that is spilt from the rest of the state?? I'll bet you anything it's less than 10%.
FOX News has now called Arizona for Biden, which only took about 90 minutes. Trump now probably has to win Michigan or Wisconsin AND Pennsylvania. Omaha is looking pretty strong given Biden's strength in the northern urban areas.
The three relevant states are NOT going to report fully tonight. If you want to go to bed, you might as well.
Arizona called for Biden by some outlets. So that's great news. He just has to win the CD in Maine *or* Omaha. And, as I said earlier, NH returned a very favorable result. Which might bode well for the Maine CD. And frankly I think NH bodes well for PA too (along with cutting down Clinton's deficit in Ohio).
We aren't going to get a result tonight tonight tho folks. So just posting this as a general PSA too.
This means that the same three nightmare states from 2016 simply will not be project-able tonight. So, if you're staying up late just in the hopes of knowing who won -- don't!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election
I'm not sure how the math works out for the democrats. They hold the house but could still lose?
"he House of Representatives is required to go into session immediately after the counting of the electoral votes to vote for president if no candidate for the office receives a majority of the electoral votes. In this event, the House is limited to choosing from among the three candidates who received the most electoral votes. Each state delegation votes en bloc, with each state having a single vote. A candidate is required to receive an absolute majority of state delegation votes (currently 26 votes) in order for that candidate to become the president-elect. The House continues balloting until it elects a president. As a consequence of the state delegation voting method, the party that holds the majority in the House could still lose the contingent election if the minority party holds the majority of state delegations."
Unless Republican House members break rank, Trump would win. It's by state delegation. And Republicans hold a large edge there. There's a part of me that would be fascinated to see this especially if Biden ended up with like a 5%+ popular vote margin.
Seeing Texas turn purple, but not enough to change all 38 red votes into 38 blue votes, reminds me that MY vote for president has been erased by the Electoral College for my entire life.
We don't even know if every vote will be counted yet. Trump has often spoken of the need to know results by Election Night, and Kavanaugh apparently believes it's okay to stop counting votes to win an election.
Both campaigns have marshaled lawyers for a protracted legal battle. Our next administration could be determined by court proceedings instead of a majority vote.
AZ is probably Biden (called by some). He's up pretty reasonably in NE02. Based on partial results that we currently have, it looks like Biden might be underperforming his polls by 2 or 3 points nationwide (which when added with a dramatic underperforming of Cuban Americans pushed Florida strongly to Trump).
Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are not going to be reporting all results, and the results in the upper midwest that are not being reported are mostly Absentee ballots which we know to be somewhat Biden favored.
If the above is correct, we might expect to see Biden win PA by 1 or 2 points, and MI/WI by a little more than that. That still leads to a Biden presidency.
The big holes in that argument are that Ohio went from looking plausibly good to pretty bad for Biden in a hurry. It's not clear what part of the vote is outstanding there, but he's down like 7 or 8 points, which is only very marginally better than Clinton did in 2016.
I think a lot of the doom and gloom here was weirdly predictable and yet still shocking. Trump overperformed the polls by 2 or 3 points, which hands him NC/GA. There was a big miss in Florida, which was the first really fully reported battleground state tonight - and we've got the "red mirage" effect in the upper midwest where we knew the last votes tallied were going to be the mail in ballots.
Really - this looks and feels a lot like 2018 in how the night started poorly. The chief difference is that it's closer than 2018 was, as well as forcing us to wait until tomorrow or later in the week for full results.
If I'm understanding this correctly, this basically means that Biden's national average in counties that have completely and totally reported right now is roughly something like a 5% national lead (Clinton won by 2% in margin, and if Biden is up another 1.5, that's 5% total).
National polls had the race somewhere between 7-8 points generally. That's roughly consistent then with a 2 or 3 point swing to Trump, which would be enough to hand him NC/GA (and Florida, as discussed, is an outlier a bit).
It wouldnt be enough to stop PA, WI, MI from going to Biden - if he keeps that margin (which is not for sure)
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The NYT needle is now showing a very minor trend to Biden and he's favored. It's all over the place.
They lost their shot in North Carolina it seems. Maine is still undecided. Montana is still undecided. Then there's also the two Georgia races going to a runoff. So a strong majority ain't gonna happen but a narrow one is still in the cards.
For some reason, I didnt understand that the Purdue/Ossof race could go to a runoff. I knew the Warnock/Collins/Loefller could - but not the other one.
That is important. Bullock is also running well ahead of Biden in Montana. I'm guessing it wont be enough, but there's an outside chance he'll come through. How wild would it be to have two senators from Montana in the US senate?
https://results.elections.virginia.gov/vaelections/2020 November General/Site/Presidential.html
Not so much where I live. WA state house candidate Sherae Lascelles (non-binary) loses their race, with incumbent straight white guy Frank Chopp up 67-33 in election night results. It might narrow some (it was about 50-30 in the primary), but with 72% of registered voters already counted county-wide, that's an insurmountable lead. I'm kind of surprised to see the third-candidate voters breaking so heavily to the incumbent, but that might be the power of running as a Democrat instead of a minor party label.
The other two seats in the district remain held by a lesbian and a gay man. (WA uses districts that each have two state house seats with two-year terms and one state senate seat with a four-year term)
Uhh - what? Unless I'm blind both that website and the NYT results show Biden up in VA still. By a few points, too. Where is he on track to lose?
Edit - NYT now shows him slightly behind, but their numbers appear to be behind your source's numbers - and those still look like a clear Biden victory.
Second Edit - Fox is thinking of changing their call on Arizona. Sounds like it'll be a close finish. That's a really (REALLY) big deal. Biden winning Arizona gave him a super plausible path to the presidency by way of WI/MI and NE02.
Could be good news! Georgia may be call-able tonight. Won't technically project Biden as an EC winner. But obviously most us can make the right educated guess.
I'm not sure of much tonight, but I'm quite sure VA is safe.
I accepted Trump's victory as legitimate last time, but when I think about the past 4 years, that policy was strictly out of custom and tradition; not right or wrong. I do not believe the majority of Americans have to live by the rule of a government they did not elect. The people are not there to serve the law; the law is there to serve the people.
And yes, I'll do the same thing if Biden wins the EC but loses the popular vote.