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!
>The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election
There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:
"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."
The Democrats maintained control of the House. There were 435 seats up for election, and a majority went to the Democrats. In 2018 they had their biggest House win ever, so it's not that surprising that a couple seats when back toward the Republicans.
Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control.
The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.
That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.
> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night
It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.
“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.
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.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) warned that President Trump should not concede defeat in the 2020 presidential election in part because Republicans will "never" be able to elect another president from their party again.
"If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again," Graham said Sunday on Fox News. "President Trump should not concede. We're down to less — 10,000 votes in Georgia. He's going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more — more votes to be counted."
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.
I haven’t dived into the exit poll data yet (by county, race, income, and age), but it really depends on which states those voters reside in. If they’re in states almost blue (Texas and Georgia, for example), it’s moot.
Florida is likely a lost cause (between conservative minorities and the elderly), but you don’t need Florida to win national elections (clearly). If the electoral college is done away with, it’s also moot, as there is enough popular vote margin at the national level to always go blue.
> 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.
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.
No, there are allegations of USPS workers coming forward from conspiracy boards. In truth, there were no such USPS workers testifying, or even claiming, any of that. Even FOX News and One America couldn't find any evidence supporting the existence of these supposed USPS workers.
And on another note: military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day since at least WWII. Are you saying that most of the military votes cast in the past 6 decades are fraudulent?
And on a final note: it hasn't been possible to backdate postdates for at least a decade, as the USPS records when mail is received separately and in addition to the postdate, and it isn't possible to backdate that data unless you have access to the USPS database. Considering that the USPS is run by a Trump appointee, it is very unlikely that Democrats have that sort of access.
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.
Utah allows ballots to be postmarked the day before the election, so long as they are received before noon of the day of the county canvass (generally, the day after the election but as late as ten days after the election, depending on the county). https://www.vote.org/utah/
(I have participated in election litigation in multiple states. I know more about election law than you do. You will not win this battle.)
The point of requiring signatures was never about preventing fraud, since it was never an issue historically. The requirements were issued in the 20th century to reject black votes, as at the time the requirements were passed, many black voters couldn't write.
> 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.