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The count counts, let it proceed

Last night’s strong showing by Donald Trump in a lot of states where he was thought to be vulnerable was surprising. It appears he may have won all the “new” battlegrounds: certainly Florida and Texas, likely Georgia and North Carolina. If you believed the polls and support Biden like me that is disappointing. So too is the apparent failure of the Democrats to gain control of the Senate.

What appears to have happened is that both Democrats and Republicans enjoyed enormous turn out , with many more people voting than in previous presidential elections. The result is a clash between red and blue waves whose outcome unpredictable, as the votes in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are still being counted. But the still uncounted ballots were mostly mailed in, which implies an advantage for Biden. Democrats did much more absentee voting while Republicans turned out more on Election Day.

That is why President Trump tried to announce his victory early this morning and pledged to go to the Supreme Court to stop “the voting,” by which he meant the vote counting. He is unlikely to be able to do that, as the votes are counted in municipalities and states over which he has little control. The Republicans will however go into court challenging procedures and ballots wherever they can. One or more of those challenges could reach the Supreme Court, as happened in Florida in 2000.

What we can say about this election so far is that it has been peaceful and orderly. The President’s threat to send his people to swarm polling places did not materialize. Neither did major Election Day voter suppression activities. There are no credible major claims of fraud or malfeasance, despite the President’s attempt to label vote counting after Election Day as criminal. If Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran aimed to undermine confidence in America’s ability to administer a democratic election, they failed. My fellow Americans seem to have enjoyed registering their dramatically different views of Donald Trump at the ballot box.

It is unclear why the polling was so far off the mark. The cause seems to be Trump voters who are not responding truthfully to pollsters. This is strange, as there is little embarrassment in calling yourself a conservative or a Republican in the places where he gets most of his votes. My guess is that in “blue” cities and suburbs, many of his supporters know he is a racist and don’t want to be tagged with that label. Denying you are a racist is very much part of American racist identity, especially in communities where it might bring opprobrium.

The outcome is still uncertain, but the Democrats and Republicans I listen to this morning (mostly on National Public Radio) think you would much rather be Joe Biden in the current situation than Donald Trump. Biden has more different routes to 270 electoral votes. The outstanding ballots will be mainly in his favor. The big question is when we’ll get a definitive resolution. The longer it takes, the more opportunity there is for Trump to disrupt the count. But there is no decent alternative to letting it proceed.

Stevenson’s army, November 3

As usual, I’ve got my Pepsi & Fritos to help me cope with the returns tonight. [No alcohol until the most important races are decided.] I never pulled an all-nighter in college, but elections can keep me awake hours longer than usual. See you tomorrow.
Historian Jill Lepore recounts vote-counting stories over the years.
Puzzle for political scientists: how come Trump’s approval rating never varied as much as his predecessors’?

WaPo has a story about possible delays or refusals to count military ballots.

I’ve known people who spent all day in Starbucks with their laptops. I suspect many people have wanted to do the same to escape quarantine at home during the pandemic. But this sounds like an even better alternative:
Mr. Edwards, head of technical operations at a filmmaking company, pays £20, equivalent to around $26, for four hours of Wi-Fi, a hot lunch, bottomless coffee and a pint of beer in the cozy chair by the roaring fire at the King’s Head pub in Winchmore Hill, north London.

Hunter Ruthven paid £15 for four hours at a pub table at the Bull & Gate, including Wi-Fi, unlimited tea and coffee and a pub-cooked lunch. He ordered eggs and smoked salmon with hollandaise sauce.

Prices vary. The King’s Head charges £20 for four hours, in London’s borough of Camden, the Lion & Unicorn bills £15 for the same; a couple of miles away in Islington, John Salt charges £10, and at the Culcheth Arms in the town of Warrington, northwest England, customers pay £12 for five hours, with all prices including lunch plus tea and coffee.

My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).

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: