[nobody9999]

>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."

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...

[laverya]

Yes, Trump performance decreasing as mail-in votes were counted was predicted. But people also predicted a lot more of a margin for Biden than actually appeared, and if we had had those margins the races currently under contention would not be. Sure, PA might still be waiting on another 100k mail-in votes - but if Biden was 300k in the lead, no one would really care.

49.7% to 49.2% is a HELL of a lot closer than the D+6 projections I saw.