Prime
Keep An Eye on This
As I’ve said many times, the President doesn’t need to concede. He has a warrant to exercise the executive powers of the United States until noon on January 20th when that warrant expires. He can board himself up in the White House and refuse to come out. But it doesn’t matter. That’s it. But that’s January 20th, more than two months from now. The modern presidency has a formal process called the transition, which goes back to 1963. That’s a matter of statutes and there a defeated incumbent President has some room to play games. Trump is already doing that.
Trump supporters in eastern Pennsylvania have been receiving what amount to anonymous incitement messages via text telling them the race is being stolen from President Trump and urging them to converge on the Philadelphia Convention Center where votes are being counted in Philadelphia. “ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU!”
This is the same location where local authorities appear to have thwarted a planned terror attack on election workers two nights ago.
Where Things Stand: He May Still Be The Puppet Master, But For How Long?
Some of them put out statements that alluded, vaguely, to some adherence to precedent in allowing votes to be counted. Some remained silent.
The roiling post-Tuesday debate about polling and polling errors is almost all heat and no light. It’s mostly emotionalism from people who are mad that the result wasn’t precisely as they’d seen predicted or been told or believed — conflating that with their unhappiness about the result itself. It’s also furious efforts to insist that polls being off confirmed their preexisting critiques of Biden or BLM or the left or the establishment or whatever. But there’s one thing I’ve heard over the last 72 hours that strikes me as real and meaningful and connects the largely meaningless debate about polling accuracy with quite critical questions about what is animating politics itself. And that is trust.
Where Things Stand: Behold The Spectacle
President Trump warned us before the election that, as early and mail-in ballots were tabulated and key states shifted blue, he was going to falsely claim that his victory was being stolen. And he warned us he would send his lawyers in to prevent that supposed theft.
But we didn’t know it was going to look like this.
Where Things Stand: We Are Far From Cleansed, Last Night Proved That
I am a big believer in nuance. Broad strokes are dangerous, limiting and do little to advance productive societal conversations or close gaps or fend off the spread of disinformation.
As the morning greets us, there are reasons for cautious optimism that Joe Biden will secure an electoral college victory. It was a very topsy turvy night for those who didn’t stay up for the whole thing. (Quite against my will I am still up from last night. Tried to sleep; failed; pulled out my iPad again to see things shifting around 4 AM.) One of the weird dynamics of the last 12 hours is that there was very little clear analysis of what the initial returns meant. Cable networks treated Ohio as a possible Biden pick up and a harbinger of midwestern strength for Biden. It ended up being a decisive Trump win. Georgia was portrayed as part of the southeastern sweep even though for most of the evening most of metro Atlanta and other urban areas had only reported a comparatively few votes. Biden may have the slightest, slightest of advantages in the remaining counting there now. I’m not entirely sure why this was the case. Going from normal returns counting to layering on uncertain mixes of mail-in, early and election day votes with decisive partisan skews is a bit like going from 3 to 4 dimensions. It’s complicated. Still, in cable network commentary it seemed to go out the window. I stuck to my list of numbers crunchers.
There was so much that was ominous in that brief speech by the President. But here’s maybe the most. This is such a shocking statement that you might think it would be some turning point where President Trump has just gone too far. And yet, this is not surprising. This is not some shocking departure from the President we’ve known for these four years. And yet it’s clear that at least close to enough people voted for his reelection.
Okay, my friends, it’s 1 AM on the East Coast. I’ve tried to get as clear a sense as I can of the remaining states or rather the remaining states that will determine the outcome of this election. I’d rather be Joe Biden than Donald Trump.
Folks, it’s been a bruising, bruising evening so far. What looked like a possible Biden blowout is certainly not turning out that way. It seems like Florida, Texas and probably North Carolina are all going to President Trump. It feels a lot like 2016. But I want to stress that in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, most of the Democratic votes don’t seem to have been counted yet. At least the particular counties I’m seeing make it look like Biden is in a good position to win these three states. Outside of the Southeast there are many counties across the country where Biden has improved the margins over Clinton in 2016. Meanwhile Biden appears to be winning Arizona, though that’s not quite certain yet.