> If people agree it was tumultuous why was the race still so close?
It wasn't all that close. Of six elections (including this one) since 2000, at least 3 and possibly 4 (votes are still being counted) were closer in popular vote, and 3 were closer in electoral vote (based on what has been called so far, regardless of how the uncalled states go.
But it was particularly actively contested, with both high turnout and high passions on both sides, which is exactly what “tumultuous” means.
It was incredibly close, so close that we waited for days to figure out who's going to win.
Biden has ~50.6%, if that's not close I don't know what is.
The fact some previous was closer, doesn't mean this one wasn't close, not sure how we even need to point this out on a site like hackernews.
> It was incredibly close, so close that we waited for days to figure out who's going to win
We didn't wait for days because it was close; races which were much closer were called much sooner.
We waited because calls are made by projections, which are based on statistical extrapolation, which are sensitive to patterns of comparable comparable ballots, and the high mail in count and partisan divide in mail-in ballot usage made projection much more difficult than it normally is.
> Biden has ~50.6%, if that's not close I don't know what is.
A >3 percentage point margin isn't close by standards that make any sense applied to US Presidential elections.
That said, even if it was particularly close, the bigger point is that that wouldn't be evidence that it wasn't tumultuous, since “tumultuous” isn't in any way opposed to “close”. That it also wasn't particularly close is a secondary issue.
We waited because of mail in voting. Biden got 50.5% but Trump got 47.7% of the popular vote. That's a pretty big spread. 74.5 million to 70.4 million. So by popular vote it was pretty significant. By electoral votes it's a much wider percentage.
Because the only thing between him and chaos was Democratic House of Representatives. That's pretty tumultuous. Also the world hates us a lot more than when he started.
Was it close? Seems like it just took a long time to process mail in ballots because the administration tried its best to invalidate them and decrease their legitimacy.
Furthermore tumultuous does not equate to unpopular. Perhaps his supporters enjoy the chaos.
This is unfortunately true, but important to point out that it is only a recent truth. Historically news agencies were neutral, striving to report unbiased news. Politicizing current events is relatively new and I do not think has been a positive innovation anywhere in the world.
Any choice in publishing one news is simultaneously an active a choice in not publishing another. Furthermore, there is not one singular truth to report in the vast majority of news, in particular of political nature.
The solution is not to find another news outlet that feels more like truth. Instead, find a few different news outlets and understand their biases.
It was "close" because the counting was so slow. If Pennsylvania was allowed to count early votes beforehand, it would've been obvious that Trump was not going to have a chance there.
Biden is going to win the popular vote by around 4-5% (~7 million votes) but the tipping point state (probably WI) by only 0.6%. If he had done 0.7% worse across the board he would have won the popular vote by 6 million votes and still lost the election. The electoral college is a monstrous indignity.
It’s why voters are making the very rare move to unseat a modern president. Joe Biden is not an exciting president, so why are people so energized during a pandemic?
It's not close at all! When California and NY and Illinois finally finish counting votes Biden is going to be up around 7 million or so votes. It's going to be the 2nd least close election since 1996 (behind the Obama 08 landslide).
And AOC openly calls for hunting down Trump supporters: "Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? ". So much for political freedom.
If "consequences" = "documenting and punishing millions of people for expressing different political opinions" then there is something seriously wrong with our political system.
Over 70 million people voted for Trump. If you hand-wave away his popularity and call all of them bigoted, then you are part of the partisan problem in our country.
No one said anything about punishments (except you). I don’t know if she is talking about citizens or public officials, but I think we should remember the public officials who helped trump’s attempt to destroy our democracy. They shouldn’t be allowed to naysay their support for him.
> then there is something seriously wrong with our political system.
There's something seriously wrong with the far left. I've seen several articles and interviews now where the leftists can't believe that someone can hold a different view than theirs and vote for Trump. It's as if only they hold the absolute truth, and everyone else is the manifestation of evil. It's quite ridiculous.
We haven't seen any protests or destruction by the right after Biden won. Had Trump won, we'd seen wide spread chaos and looting and burning. It's not for nothing that many stores in large cities boarded up.
What they're doing by keeping these lists is not that different from the Nazis keeping lists of Jews. Very ironic.
Both left and right are becoming more partisan and more unable to form any sort of consensus or compromise. I think that's the real issue, when the goal of each side is only to crush their opponent.
Like keeping and making publicly available a database of people who publicly supported a political candidate? Is that the Nazi policy you're referring to?
Correct. Cancel culture is destructive and toxic. The goal is to set loose the SJW mobs after those individuals. Ironic that they don't see that this very similar to what was done to the Jews in Nazi Germany. They don't see it in the midst of their virtue signaling destructive behavior.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Maybe I'm wrong here but if a there were a new Russian President of Queen or England I'd want to be informed, as we all have to interact with each other.
But again, maybe I'm wrong and it's just me. I never flag and can't downvote so maybe the people that do are correct.
I'd say you are wrong, yes. HN isn't supposed to be your source of news, it is supposed to be a source of interesting topics to discuss. Hence "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" (from the guidelines).
This rule is one of the main reasons HN hasn't gone down in flame wars yet - topics like these routinely result in people losing their temper and the rational discourse goes out the window.
Probably upset Trump supporters (if the election went the other way, it'd likely get flagged by Biden supporters) - HN is a diverse group.
The HN guidelines do say politics should be considered off-topic: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
There's a ton of duplicate (even if separate URLs) submissions.
I don't know that I'd agree, but the point is, we don't have to care. Whether the comments are left or right, we don't want HN to become a political comments free-for-all. There's plenty of places on the Internet (as in, everywhere that isn't HN) for that.
Yes, but during that time, there was a TON of submissions that were flagged. In all likelihood, HN admins will pick ONE article to remain. "Duplicate" submissions should be flagged.
It's sort of premature to call this "decided." Georgia is likely to do a recount and three states seem to still be outstanding (when I checked moments ago).
Biden doesn't need Georgia to win. Pennsylvania gave him enough electoral votes that he can lose Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia (assuming he wins the other states the media says he won)
Yes, I'm aware. And Trump is talking of suing (claiming election fraud) as well, or so I understand.
My best understanding is this is not really settled yet. I'm guessing this may be a contributing factor to why some people -- not me -- are flagging these articles.
Articles get flagged by users. Unless someone doing the flagging is willing to speak up, speculation is all we really have and even having some people speak up doesn't mean we know all the reasons why people choose to flag a piece.
And now they are both flagged. Ridiculous. I doubt the no politics rule on HN is fair at this point. I understand why it's present, but I feel it just silences waves of valid discussion about important topics.
I can not help but feel that Trump supporters are brigading these threads and actively trying to bury them. The fact that only old enough accounts can downvote means these are experienced HN contributors. Unsettling, really.
Unfortunately the red team has been working to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. The country is far bluer than the electoral map would suggest, thanks to years of voter suppression.
Are we watching the same election? We just had an election with historic turnout and easy voting and Biden will have won by less than Obama did twice. Against a historically unpopular President in the middle of a pandemic. Doesn’t that suggest the map is about as blue as we thought?
Also, the “red team” has been actively helping expand voter access all over the country. The Republican Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican state legislature played a major role in expanding voter access in Georgia the last couple of years (obviously they’re the ones with the actual power to change the election laws): https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/vote...
> Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the increase in registered voters shows the success of automatic voter registration and highlights other ways election officials have improved voting access, such as absentee voting for anyone who requests a mailed ballot and three weeks of early voting.
This election should be a wake up call to entire country and Democrats in particular. There was no blue wave, if anything Biden has barely squeaked past the post.
If it were not for the pandemic I'm convinced the Trump turnout for this election would have produced results rivaling Reagan in 1984. Even with a pandemic he was able to drive more voters to the polls on election day than any point in American history.
In an election where polling was showing him losing the 60+ vote in Florida. Hispanic people may not turnout for Republicans the way they did this year, but retirees certainly won’t be doing the same for Democrats.
Trump is historically unpopular among people in the suburbs. Biden won my county by 15-20. It hadn’t voted Democrat before 2016. And Larry Hogan won my county by 38 points in 2018.
Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!
Even the Trump campaign said their base of old, white voters were dying off [1]. In another 4 years, another 7.3 million older voters (typically conservative voters) will have aged out. The country will continue to turn blue [2]. Democrats still have a lot of work to do on messaging.
Trump appears to have done better with minority voters than any other Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, which will do something to counter the 'aging out' that you describe.
> While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.
> It’s a similar story with younger Hispanic Americans, a group where Trump has also made gains. According to UCLA Nationscape’s polling, Trump is attracting 35 percent of Hispanic voters under age 45, up from the 22 percent who backed him four years ago in the CCES data.
UCLA polling in battleground states shows that Black voters 30-60 are three times more likely to trust congressional Republicans that Black voters over 60 (21% versus 8%). In the 18-29 group it’s almost four times (29%).
> Are we watching the same election? We just had an election with historic turnout and easy voting and Biden will have won by less than Obama did twice.
I won't comment on whether the US is red or blue or purple.
However, it's quite clear that the Trump administration specifically and the Republican party in general have been engaged in actively suppressing voters in general, and the democratic party's electorate in specific.
We're talking about an administration that, while fully aware that there was a disproportionate and significant amount of pro-Democratic party voters who depended on mail-in ballots to cast their vote, they did their best to:
* sabotage the USPS's ability to process and ship mail up to the election,
* enforce rules refusing to account for all mail-in ballots,
* and prop up their own electorate to vote in person to avoid the risk of their votes being filtered out by their sabotage campaign.
We're talking about a campaign designed to filter out votes to competing candidates, hoping to skew election results in your favor.
This is not how a party that values basic democratic values operates.
The thing is that Republicans, or more precisely, those on the right, aren't even hiding this. They openly state it. Republic, not democracy is the latest form of this rallying cry.
The financiers of the right are increasingly open about not wishing for a democracy in the US. The similarity here with the industrialists during the Weimar Republic is by the way striking.
There is literal evidence of this happening. The Republican playbook for the last decade has been disenfranchisement of people who don't vote for them. Killing or hobbling USPS was this year's novel strategy.
What I see is 4 million more votes for Biden than Trump. In any other electoral system this would have been a rout.
Whether or not it will happen remains to be seen. Certainly I won't deny that among the people who have faith in the media (Biden supporters) they are convinced it will happen.
The election is a legal process and it's declared him the presumptive winner. Same as Trump on election night in 2016.
Everything else that happens are formalities, however important and necessary. Other than the 2000 election, we haven't waited this long to announce the next president following a presidential election.
And it isn't even close, Biden has more differential votes by percentage than Nixon, Truman, or Reagan.
That hasn't yet been decided, but that's not even the point.
edit: so i've now been rate limited for posting three things. What the posters beyond assume is not what I meant. I'll not be able to answer for about two days or so. nice
Yes, we still have the lawsuits to go through, states must certify their results, and the electoral college must meet on December 14. In other words, the exact same process that happens in every other election (obviously the lawsuits are a slight wrinkle) There's a tiny, tiny chance the results could be changed.
Did you also go around insisting that the election hadn't been decided yet after the media called it for Trump on election night 2016, or are you only doing it this time around because he lost?
We just had an election with widespread mail in voting with extended deadlines and historic turnout. And if anything Trump’s support among non-white voters went up. What does that suggest re: the scale of voter suppression?
The GOP actively sought, across the country, to handicap or prevent mail and absentee voting to suppress votes that typically fall to Democrats. The president tweeted about unproven voter fraud and to stop counting votes. If that isn’t attempts at brazen voter suppression, I don’t know what is.
Oregon and Colorado have successfully done mail in voting for years, with safeguards like ballots having to arrive by Election Day and signature verification. Democrats fought to get rid of rules like that all over the country, and succeeded in Pennsylvania.
Requiring ballots to arrive by Election Day is the only reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you leave open the possibility of fraud as has been alleged in PA with multiple USPS workers coming forward and testifying that they witnessed backdating of mail in ballots.
In Washington state where I used to live has had universal mail in ballots for many years and they had ballot drop boxes that were swept on election day. There was extensive information that was put out informing people of the last day they could mail their ballots in.
Signatures are still required in Pennsylvania, and many states have allowed ballots to arrive after the election for decades, including 3 of the states still uncalled (NV, NC, and Georgia).
Moreover, military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day in nearly all states since at least WWII.
It’s one thing to allow a limited number of ballots to arrive for military or absentees. But states that conduct elections primarily by mail (Oregon, Colorado) require ballots to arrive by Election Day.
> Democracy was stress tested, and it still worked.
The fake allegations of voter fraud and the extensive efforts to suppress votes will damage future elections. And the presidential election survived attacks, but the senate could be impacted.
Your comment about the first president to not start or accelerate a war since last 6 or 7 terms, at least, is too rich in irony. Trump had many issues but bombing wedding parties to extinction was more of an Obama thing.
With a lead of only 34k votes in Pennsylvania, and 135k ballots still left to count, considering the tensions in the country, IMHO the Associated Press should have waited a bit more before declaring Biden as a winner…
Everyone with the numbers called it back on Wednesday when Trump technically still had a lead. It's a double whammy: all of the votes left are not only in overwhelmingly blue areas, they're also mail in ballots. They're blue at >80% rate.
It was clear to me looking at the PA numbers that Biden had this in the bag by Wednesday morning. All you had to do was look at the fact that even though Trump won the early red states, he was not performing as well as he did in 2016. There was a lot made out of FL going for Trump early on, and he was in fact up there compared to 2016. But that was pretty much one of the only places he was. He ran down 3 in TX, down 5 in GA, down 2 in NC, down 2 in IA, down 4 in WY, down almost 7 in MT and KS, down 7 in ME, down 7 in NH.
All told by the end of Tuesday he was down in 30+ states (as it is settling now, he's down in 38 states compared to his 2016 margin). He won PA, MI, and WI by less than a point each in 2016. So if Trump was seeing shifts of 3 away from him in Texas, it didn't take a psychic to know he'd be losing those states he won at such a small margin.
If you looked at the numbers in PA on Wednesday morning, what you saw were tons out outstanding ballots in Lehigh, Bucks, Monroe, Philadelphia, and Allegheny counties, all counties that went for Clinton in 2016. You combine that with the fact that Democrats returned mail-in ballots at a rate of 65% compared to 23% for Republicans, and this thing seemed inevitable since about Wednesday morning.
Yes, technically Biden is almost certain to win.
But this is about taking the high road and not leaving any doubt (that might be exploited to sow more doubt).
>Not a true statement I'm afraid. Look at the number of votes he got. Trumpism isn't going away any time soon.
Tumult(n.)[0]:
"1. violent and noisy commotion or disturbance of a crowd or mob; uproar: The tumult reached its height during the premier's speech.
2. a general outbreak, riot, uprising, or other disorder: The tumult moved toward the embassy.
3. highly distressing agitation of mind or feeling; turbulent mental or emotional disturbance: His placid facade failed to conceal the tumult of his mind."
I imagine that many on every side would agree with that statement.
I think this very much remains to be seen. There’s a history of movements like this, essentially based around one figure and lacking a coherent ideology, crumbling once Dear Leader is perceived as a loser. It’s not inevitable that that will happen in this case, but it’s certainly plausible.
I would assume that most of his bluster about actually winning is aimed more at casting doubt on this in the minds of his followers than any realistic hope of overturning the process.
Not to make people nervous or anything but the US has had a president with non-consecutive terms before. It's not implausible to imagine Trump continuing to direct the Republican party while out of office.
First thing I am going to do is submit my resume for open tech leadership and policy positions in the new administration.
If you are in a position with experience and financial comfort to serve your country with regards to science and technology, the Biden administration will almost certainly be a great place to land. Look for policy and leadership positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
I'll be submitting my resume and cover letter just as soon as the transition team site opens.
Close in the Electoral College, where it matters; quite distant in the popular vote. The gap is estimated to be about 4 million more votes for Biden at this time, it is also the most votes for a president in US history.
e: I will concede that it is not "quite distant", though it may not end up close in the EC when it's all said and done either.
It's probably going to be quite a bit more than 4 million. There are still several heavily blue states that have a lot of votes left to count.
California, for example, has only counted 77% of their votes. New York has counted 84%. Illinois has counted 89%.
I just caught the end of some discussion of this on NPR. Based on the number of votes left to count in the various states and how they are expected to turn out, there is a good chance it will end up at around 8 million.
Also, it probably makes more sense to look at it out of the number of voters, or the number of people who could have voted, rather than out of the whole population.
It's currently 4 million of 145 million votes, since not all 330 million people are voters, and that number will go up since the outstanding votes are in large, overwhelmingly Democratic states.
As if 50% of the US population is going through some kind of collective psychosis. Just looking at how a significant portion of his fans act and look on those rallies. Dressing up with jumpsuits having flags and his face allover or wearing stupidly huge hats with a motto printed on it. As if they are on some comic con where Trump is some sort of super hero. Carrying assault rifles like they can't wait to save the world from imagined threats, dressing up like Romans with shields and helmets. Totally delusional. This level of celebrated infantilism I've never seen anywhere else so far. There are nuts everywhere but that many?
That's because, despite all the "it's Russia's fault" hysteria, Trump more or less represents about 50% of Americans- as these elections have just shown. The scary part (to me, as a European) is that this means that a good chunk of the other 50%, while certainly despising Trump, cannot be ideologically that distant- they live in the same country and immersed in the same culture after all.
The US is a very large country and a lot of legal powers are left to individual states. It's like saying that Poland represents the same views as Germany in Europe because they're both in the EU.
It's actually way worse than that. About a quarter of eligible voters voted for each. Half the population sat and watched the last four years, and still couldn't be bothered.
Also he is a sitting president with a decent economy. It takes a lot for an incumbent to not win re-election at that point. Somewhat sane coronavirus response and Trump would have an easy victory.
It's probably impossible for Trump's coronavirus response to have been seen as sane or reasonable, regardless of what he did. For example, Biden very publicly claimed without basis that Trump's China travel ban actually made things worse, whilst meanwhile here in the UK one of the avenues of attack on our government (which is seen as Trump-like) is that our scientists reckon that not introducing a ban on travel from China almost exactly like Trump's made things worse. Trump gets attacked for not imposing a centrally-mandated lockdown, ours gets attacked for imposing too much centralized command and control and not leaving things up to regions. And so on and so forth. Also, no matter how much Covid testing either the UK or US does, it's always described as though it's falling behing the rest of the world regardless of facts. (I wonder if that will magically fix itself once Biden takes office.) And as for hoping to get good outcomes overall... look at what's been happening throughout Europe. It would take something more like a miracle than a basic, workable response of the kind you could expect from a government of typical competence to get good enough results that it wouldn't be seen as a failure. France, run by someone the entire media spun as basically the anti-Trump, has been reporting about half as many cases a day as the entire US with a rather smaller population and they don't seem to be slowing down.
The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.
It's one thing to put the best minds in charge of a no-win response and for it to fail. If Trump had put the best minds in the CDC and the NIAID in charge of the Covid response and just allowed them to do their thing (instead of undermining them at every turn), that would be one thing.
Instead he puts his son in law in charge of the Coronavirus response, so we are all left to wonder how it could have been if the experts were in charge. Maybe it would be different, maybe it's a no win situation like you said. But at least then we would know there was nothing more to do. No one would be wondering "Maybe things would have been different if Jared Kushner were put in charge of this..."
We all see the pandemic and how it affects our lives. When Trump tells us that it's no big deal, that it's a media hoax that will go away with the election, that doesn't make him look good. That's a choice he's making to do that. It didn't have to be this way.
Or alternatively, the team that chose Trump has disenfranchised so many of the other team (and relied on the ancient electoral college) that their undersized votes have outsized effects.
Yeah, no new wars in the middle east and troops are coming home. How can a president win reelection with that kind of record? Luckily CNN will save democrazy.
I really think adding little adjectives like that undermines the respectedness of the NYT