It’s all over, now it starts

Close to 100 million people have already voted across the United States, about two-thirds of the number who voted in 2016. By this evening, another 70 million or so will have voted, meaning a record turnout of 65% or so since World War II. That may sound low to many of you, but America’s elections, even national ones, are run by the states and localities, which have no automatic way of registering or un-registering people. Many voters remain on the rolls even after they move or die. The real turnout numbers are probably closer to 75-80%.

Former Vice President Biden is the odds-on favorite to win. The Economist has him at 96% probability to gain a majority in the Electoral College, which meets on December 14 to cast each states’ electoral votes (equal to the number of senators and representatives each has, or in the case of the District of Columbia should have, in the Congress). This system of indirect election, invented to favor slave states in the late 18th century, today gives states with smaller populations disproportionate weight in the election of the President, since each has two senators in addition to a number of representatives determined by their population.

The Electoral College also means that small differences in a few states can make an enormous difference and lead to the election of a president who fails to get a majority of the popular vote. That happened with Donald Trump in 2016 and with George W. Bush in Florida, when a difference of 500 or so votes in Florida secured his victory once the Supreme Court stopped the re-counting.

Trump is expecting a good showing in the results today, because it takes longer to count the 60 million or more mail-in ballots. That is why he is trying to convince Republican-led states to stop the counting on Election Day, even though it is common for counting to continue for a week or so thereafter and for results not to be certified for weeks after that. The Republicans have also been going into court and state legislatures to get decisions that would suppress voting among minorities, who hold the key to the outcome in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.

That effort looks likely to fail. My hope this morning is that there will be an early and decisive outcome this evening. The key early indicators will be Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. If Trump loses any one of these–especially Florida–he is in big trouble. If he loses all of them, he’s a goner. The polling errors that plagued forecasts in 2016 won’t be repeated this year: the good forecasters have made big efforts to take into account poll quality and to watch state polls with care. Biden’s national poll margin is much wider than Hillary Clinton’s. Besides, many of those now being polled have already voted. There is no inhibition about saying you voted for Trump, as there was before the 2016 election.

Your local press may be featuring photos of stores being boarded up in DC and elsewhere. There is certainly some chance of demonstrations and violence in the aftermath. The President has even forecast it, in a tweet opposing extended time for counting ballots allowed by the Supreme Court that Twitter warned about:

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process. Learn more

The Supreme Court decision on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one. It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!

He is not however talking about violence by those who oppose him, but by his supporters. You might even think he is inciting it. Trump is certainly capable of unleashing his Proud Boys and other white supremacist gangs in an effort to get the vote-counting stopped, or to protest the results.

There is also some risk of violence on the left, not from Democrats but from those who identify as anti-Fascists (“Antifa”), which is more an ideology than an organization (according to the FBI). They are nowhere near as intentional, politically connected, or as heavily armed as the right-wing armed groups (“militias”), whom the President has touted and asked to “stand by.” Antifa activists do not however shy from riot and violence, especially against the police and other security forces.

I am hoping that none of that will prove pertinent. An early, clear result this evening would solve a lot of problems. Then we could read tomorrow about how foolish it was for Trump to have imagined he could be re-elected after having failed to deal with the epidemic, sent the economy into a tailspin, catered only to his base and not to independents, courted white supremacists, and offended women. I’d much prefer that to discussion of how Biden was not after all the right candidate, no matter how decent and empathetic he is.

But even if Biden wins today, he has an enormous challenge ahead: to restore the country to health and prosperity, secure it against foreign adversaries, revive alliances, and ensure that nothing like Donald Trump will ever happen again.

PS: This doesn’t sound like a winner to me. His rallies buoy him, even if he feels compels to lie about their size, but that doesn’t say anything about support in the country as a whole, or even in the battleground states: