Let’s face it, this was not the night we were hoping for. But let’s keep focus here. This isn’t about our hopes, our feelings, our betting pools, or our desire to see Donald Trump humiliated.
That was my desire. I wanted to see Florida turn blue hard and early and make this thing not even close.
Well, it didn’t happen. But my dream Election Night isn’t what matters at the end of the day. What matters is 270 electoral votes. That’s the rule. That doesn’t mean you should really get 335 to put an exclamation point on it, or you need 285 just to be safe. You need 270, period. And the truth is that still, awful as Tuesday night was, Biden is closer to 270 than Trump is.
Flipping Arizona was big. If he can also flip the big three of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, he’s north of 270. Even without Pennsylvania, he’s at 270, under several scenarios.
Biden tried to reassure supporters with a brief live statement to supporters in Wilmington around 12:40 a.m. “We feel good about where we are,” he said. “We believe we’re on track to win this election.” He elaborated a bit, mentioning Arizona and Minnesota, and then: “We’re still in the game in Georgia, and that’s not even one we expected. We’re feelin’ real good about Wisconsin and Michigan. And it’s gonna take time to count the votes, but we’re gonna win Pennsylvania.”
He added that it’s neither his nor Trump’s place to declare victory. Biden was trying to rally his dejected troops but also tell the press not to put their finger on the scale.
Trump, who at the moment he issued this rebuttal tweet was behind in both the popular vote and the electoral vote tally, wrote: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
For the record, when Trump talks about votes cast after Election Day, what he’s referring to is votes counted after Election Day. All votes were cast before Election Day. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin count those votes after Election Day by law, but they were cast before. Everyone knows this. Trump, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, everyone.
And when he came out to speak at 2:20 a.m., he said he’s going to try to shut the counting down. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Trump said. “We want all the voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four in the morning and add them to the list.” Mind you, in Pennsylvania, they’re not even allowed to count mail-in ballots until Election Day. The president of the United States just said he wants to shut down a vote-counting process that is dictated by state law. Trump is ahead by nearly 700,000, but 2 million votes, mostly in Biden-friendly cities, haven’t been counted. Without a trace of irony, he complained about “a fraud on the American people” and called this “a sad moment, a very sad moment.” I’ve rarely seen something so predictable yet so chilling.
So what we’re going to have today, maybe the rest of this week, is one candidate saying count the votes, and another candidate saying, dishonestly as usual, that the other side is trying to steal it, when in fact he’s the one trying to stop the counting while he’s still ahead. It’s corrupt on its face. And what’s more maddening is that he might find some judge or judges to agree with him.
And what’s most maddening is that this is even close. The reason we started to believe these stories about Biden sweeping through Florida and North Carolina and even Texas was that it just seemed like surely some 3 or 4 or 5 percent of people who took a flyer on Trump four years ago would look at his train wreck of a record and decide there was no way they wanted a piece of that again.
But they do. While Trump is going to lose the popular vote again, he’s going to get more total votes than he did in 2016.
A quarter of a million people are dead from a situation he completely screwed up. The economy is a mess. You don’t even need me to catalog it. I don’t have the energy to right now. But after everything he’s done, the idea that 70-something million people could vote for this man is beyond belief.
And with the virus bearing down on us again. By the end of the month, the experts say, we’re going to be up around 200,000 cases a day. And the man who spent the last two weeks of the campaign saying we’d rounded the corner and it’s going away might get reelected.
And what does this tell us about the polls? Oh, Hillary wasn’t up this big. We’ve corrected our weighting since ’16. I believed it. But they were more wrong than last time.
It’s shocking. But it’s not over.
Keep the faith, guys, we’re gonna win this.
