2020 Presidential Election Results & Exit Polls commentary thread

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1324534164826296323

Ehm... "redacted"?

He's just being annoying.  He doesn't want to say "Safe Biden" because ABC has to make that call.

Also by replying to that tweet without changing the numbers, I'm assuming he's agreeing with those numbers, which are the 57-43 numbers.  Not the fake news Kornacki 59%

[GeneralMacArthur]

Al Gross declaring victory is clearly the most insane thing said today.

Wtf, that is the most bizarre one I've heard.

It's fake news.  Gross didn't declare victory.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So back on topic--- anyone want to provide an update about how many outstanding votes there are by County in PA, and which places are continuing to count / report Tonight / through the early Morning?

Yeah do we have any more scheduled ballot drops from AZ or GA?

NV I'm assuming we won't get anything until tomorrow night.

PA seems to just be releasing a thousand votes every half hour or so.

[GeneralMacArthur]

DDHQ just had a new drop of Arizona votes, probably not from Maricopa.

Drop of 6,691 votes...and Trump won...44.06% of them so Biden netted 795.

And for the doomsayers, 44.06 would be less than 57% or 59% percent.

It was from Coconino so it was expected to be favorable for Biden. Biden is still on good pace to win because Trump probably can't get enough from Maricopa.

Coconino was 64-36 Biden, so Trump closing the gap by 16 points is a pretty solid result.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So if Biden already won, why isn't anything called? Do they fear Trump too much?

If you're a network, you REALLY don't want to get this one wrong.  Just wait 48 hours until we go from 95% sure to 99.9% sure.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Newsflash: Trump is losing every uncalled state besides Alaska.

You're forgetting NC, right?

Biden is going to win NC. Ballots have until the 12th to arrive.

NC is a heavy lift, how about the senate race?

Mr. Historically Sexy is underperforming Biden so seems even more unlikely he wins it.

Goddamn dumbass MAY have cost us the Senate, depending on hiw the run-offs go.

Seeing as the GA races probably go the same way, another race wouldn't cost the Senate.

No I can definitely see Warnock-Perdue voters, give how much weaker Loeffer was in head to head polling. Inb4 ‘polling in 2020’

My votes in the GA Senate runoffs are up for grabs. Look forward to discussing with everyone in the next couple of months.

If you follow politics closely enough that you're on Atlas, why would you want to keep Mitch McConnell in charge of Congress, ensuring that absolutely nothing gets done for the next two years?

If Ossoff and Warnock don't win, we're basically doomed to another two years of frustration, gridlock, and brinksmanship.

Also, why would you reward the party that completely sold out to Donald Trump with your vote?  McConnell has been Trump's personal hatchet man for the last four years and now we want to turn around and act like he's a respectable political player?  The party has to suffer some kind of punishment, some kind of time in the wilderness, for what they've done to the country under Trump.  Otherwise, they'll just do it again, seeing as they suffered no consequences.

Four years of Trumpism, and we're going to go back to the 2014 status quo of Mitch refusing to pass any legislation and turning the Senate into a vehicle for partisan hackery?  The country deserves better.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I just noticed that Hickenlooper smashed Cory Gardner by 9%.

This when Mark Kelly is only up by 3.4%.  The two candidates were both considered about equally safe.

So much for the "Hickenlooper was a bad candidate" takes.  Looks like he's the only Senate candidate in a competitive race to match his polling.

[GeneralMacArthur]

LOL at all the love for McCain. Dems have completed their transition to the party of Reagan/Bush.

Someone posted McCain's 2008 concession speech about 100 pages ago in this thread.  What a throwback to the days when there were a few class acts left in the party.

[GeneralMacArthur]

What times are we expecting get more information from NV and AZ?

At what point do we expect GA and PA to be called?

Is NC going to start counting tonight or wait until tomorrow?

[GeneralMacArthur]

According to https://alex.github.io/nyt-2020-election-scraper/battleground-state-changes.html, Biden has now taken an insurmountable lead in Georgia, up 4267 with only 3552 left to count.

I suppose we still have to wait for the military/overseas ballots, but the way things are going Biden will win Georgia by around 5,000 votes.  It doesn't seem likely that there will be enough military/overseas ballots to make closing the gap a remote possibility for Trump even under extraordinary circumstances.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/cd2020cd2020/status/1324775439181717505?s=20

Martha McCallum was crying and feigning outrage over this with Jonathan Turley (the GOP's impeachment "scholar") earlier today.  Just in case there was any question whether Fox News was suddenly the good guys.  No, they still suck.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So tonight's programming is:

AZ drop at 9 PM

Networks potentially making the AZ+NV call between 9-10 PM

Biden speech at 1130 PM

is that right?

And it looks like nobody's ever going to call Georgia because they're too afraid of military ballots?

[GeneralMacArthur]

What a embarrassing low margin in PA and WI, considering Biden is probably going to win the NPV by over 4 points after the slow counting blue states finish. Despite all the hype about NC's leftward trend, this another state that is very stubborn for Democrats and is going to be around R+ 5-6% compared to the NPV.

The electoral college is 3-4 points to the right of the nation.  Democrats will have to win elections by 3-4 points in the NPV for the foreseeable future to hold the presidency.

The House is so gerrymandered that Dems were only able to get a 36-seat advantage in an election they won by 8%.  The clincher flip was CA-10 which Dems won by 4.5%, so shift the results 4.5% to the right and the Republicans hold the House despite losing the election by 3-4%.  This means the House is just as rigged in favor of the GOP as the electoral college.

And don't even get me started on the Senate, where states with 2 Dem senators represent 47.22% of the American population, while states with 2 GOP senators represent 41.1%, yet the GOP controls the chamber.  Split the 1-1 states, and the Democratic minority represents 53.04% of the country, while the Republican majority represents 46.96% of the country.  Democrats got 124 million votes between the 2014, 2016, and 2018 elections, while Republicans only got 99.7 million -- meaning if you combine all the elections that resulted in the current makeup of congress, Dems won by 11%, 55.5% to 44.5%.  And that 11-point combined win over the last 6 years earned them a 47-53 minority.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Jesus. Nearly 4M left in CA alone.

https://twitter.com/WinWithJMC/status/1324883424696471552

These alone might increase Biden's national PV margin by a full 1%.

Could Biden end up with over 80,000,000 votes?

[GeneralMacArthur]

What date does the Electoral College meet? Trump can try legal shenanigans until then but after that date there is constitutionally nothing he can do.

They vote on December 13 and the votes are counted/affirmed by Congress on January 6.

I'm sure Trump will continue our four-year-long national civics lesson by trying some sort of nonsense to rig the electoral college or prevent them from meeting, spawning a news cycle in which we must all learn the details of how the electoral college works and what the exact rules are that govern its activities.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Given that it's been a whole 30 minutes and no one has posted everything, I want to reiterate the level of caution being used by the major networks. Everything I've heard is that their not calling states until they are at least 99.5% certain of the outcome. That's the chances of a one in 200 thing occurring. While it seems increasingly likely that the remaining states won't go to Trump, I don't think it's one in 200 chance unlikely that whatever's left ends up going his way. And, again, the election is called state by state, so even if Biden has multiple paths through multiple states, each state must individually pass that one in 200 threshold.

At this point I feel pretty confident saying there's not a 1-in-200 chance that Trump wins Pennsylvania.

There's 83,000 votes left and Trump needs 67% of them to win.  He's been getting about 25% of the vote for the last 1.5 million ballots and there's nothing unique about the remaining 83,000 ballots other than that they have some technicalities that makes them take longer to count.  What's more likely is that Biden will win 75% of them and end up winning PA by 80,000 votes.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Meanwhile Fox News, instead of covering the speech, is having a long, long conversation about Trump's compelling and credible allegations of election rigging.  The Biden/Harris stage is literally on their screen and Bret Bair and Martha MacCallum are talking about how the Trump team "raises a lot of questions" and how there's "serious concerns about transparency."

F--k Fox News.

Oh joy, now they've got some guy on to try to sell the story that all the gridlock in Washington is the Democrats' fault.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Haha I wonder if they show up to the unveiling of his library. Will he even have a library lol?

I doubt it.  The library is usually for presidential notes and records.  Trump obviously didn't take any notes or have any diaries or anything like that, and they're probably going to destroy all the records because there's not a single record that wouldn't risk revealing some sort of illegal, secret corruption or shenanigans.

Furthermore, a Trump library would be a permanent target for people who hate him.  It would be the equivalent of the confederate statues in Virginia, just a magnet for opposition and protest.

The only way a Trump library would be acceptable is if it's completely honest about how awful his presidency is and functions more as a memorial than as a library.  So we may never forget what happens when we as a country screw up this badly.

[GeneralMacArthur]

And now Karl Rove is trying to make a thing out of COVID regulations at the inaugural ball and inauguration, and Bret Baier is grinning with delight at the possibility of kicking of the Obama-era obsession with trivialities and making scandals out of absolutely nothing.

We're about to get coffee salute, tan suit, fist-bump, flag pin, Common at the White House poetry slam, Van Jones being a terrorist, Shirley Sherrod being a black supremacist, and so on.  All these trivial fake outrages that Fox News ginned up into outrage news cycles.

[GeneralMacArthur]

God, I'm sorry, I love my country:

https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/1325260977693188101

It's all going to go back to normal so quickly and it's beautiful to see.

I saw speculation of Biden's cabinet and COVID panel on the news today and was like, my god this feels so normal.  I'm excited to see who he picks and optimistic that they'll get the job done and make my life better.

I never felt that way about the Trump administration.  It was always either dread or mockery -- what morons is he going to pick?  If he picks competent people, how will he screw them over and undermine them?  What damage are they going to try and do?

And then it hit me, Trump isn't relevant at all anymore.  We're not talking about the next awful thing Trump is doing to do to mismanage this crisis.  We're not talking about the next dastardly plan Trump has to make America worse.  We're talking about a normal president with normal people who genuinely want to make things better.  And that's such a relief, it's a feeling I haven't felt in a long time.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This is exactly what the GOP wants right now, more Trump campaign rallies.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Hillary Clinton lost an incredibly-narrow shock election, that she almost certainly should have won, had she not been undermined at the last minute by a fake investigation launched by the partisan FBI.  The main contributing factor to her defeat was the military intelligence agency of a hostile foreign government interfering in the electoral process to aid Trump through illegal activities, in coordination with his senior campaign staff, as proven by the Mueller Report and the Stone/Manafort/Papadopoulous/Gates/etc. depositions.

In spite of all this, it didn't take 12 hours for Hillary Clinton to be designated BIGGEST LOSER EVER and ordered by the media to shut up and go into permanent hiding while column after column was written about how pathetic she was, how awful her campaign was, what a tremendous loser she was.  The NYT immediately sent an army of reporters out to midwestern highway diners to find out why Trump won.  Trump supporters gloated non-stop and mocked anyone who was upset.  "Awww, liberal tears?  You triggered?"  The gloating didn't stop until a week ago when Trump lost.  White supremacists and neo-nazis and neo-confederates proudly paraded through our streets, waving signs, celebrating their guy becoming president.

Nobody claimed that the election was "stolen" from Hillary by voter fraud, election manipulation, vote rigging, or any similar shenanigans (nobody except Jill Stein, who took the opportunity to grift for "recount funds").  We were upset that the election had been "stolen" by Comey, and we were upset that Russia's act of war would go unpunished by a subservient, obsequious Trump administration more interested in covering up their wrongdoing than defending America's elections.  We were upset that the press gave Trump billions of dollars of free earned media, while 90% of their Hillary coverage was about the e-mail "scandal", which everyone stopped pretending to care about the day after the election.



Now, the situation is that Trump suffered a solid defeat in an election where Biden led wire-to-wire, with no shenanigans, no assists from partisan government officials, no assists from hostile foreign intelligence operatives.  And yet a week later, we're being told not to rub it in, to be understanding, to give the Trump people space to accept reality, time to deal with their loss.  To be nice.

It's such a huge double standard.  Imagine if, a week after her loss, Hillary Clinton was out there claiming that votes were rigged, that Trump only won with illegal ballots, that she was going to file dozens of lawsuits.  Imagine if she was fundraising for court cases to challenge Trump's victory.  Imagine if the united message of the Democratic Party was "we're not going to accept Trump's victory as legitimate until every single state ratifies their results."  Imagine if the leadership of the DNC was echoing false allegations of voter fraud and insisting that Clinton was the rightful winner.

They would have been lambasted in the media.  The mockery and degradation would have been intense and relentless.  Every last Democrat would be paraded in front of the cameras for ritual humiliation.  And the press would have been right to do so!

So why aren't Republicans being treated this way?  All we're getting is "fact-checking" and wishy-washy statements like "of course if there are illegal ballots, those should be thrown out, but there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud" that just lend points to the Trump team.

And boy, I'll tell you something else, nobody's come knocking on my door to find out why I voted for Biden.  The media just seems to think that people voting for Democrats is the default state of play, and that Republican victories are some fascinating aberration that only happens because the Democrats screw up.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1325951831667699712

Why is this set to Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto?

[GeneralMacArthur]

these turnout numbers are incredible. 

Not sure if Trump was the worst thing to happen to American democracy or the best thing.  He unquestionably got more people interested in politics.

Trump also was basically taking a firehose to our entire system, revealing any weak points or cracks or holes and just blasting them away with water.

It's now extremely clear that ew can't rely on "norms" or "decency" or "integrity" to hold government officials accountable and expect them to maintain our founding principles.  The Trump administration has revealed countless constitutional loopholes or bureaucrats with way too much unchecked power.  Those all need to be fixed.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So Biden is easily breaking 80,000,000 votes at this point, right?  Just incredible.  Hopefully Trump stays below 75,000,000.