2020 US Election - Current Events

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
It's officially November 3rd, 2020, Election Day, on the East coast. I'm sure it's going to be an interesting and bumpy ride for at least the next 36 hours.

There's obvious potential for disinformation and conspiracy theories. As Joe Usinski says, the losers in any election are far more likely to form conspiracy theories about it than the winners. That will happen here. But I suspect it will be on a significantly greater scale than previous election years.

I personally hope it's a decisive and unequivocal win for Biden. I know that won't stop the theories, but it will at least keep them on the fringe.

I'll be up late with a bottle of wine. Seeing what happens.
 
I suppose it's a mark of getting older when one ages out of being unable to sleep on Christmas Eve and ages into being unable to sleep during a major election. ;)

Oh well, here we go again.
 
A bit of Nate Silver fun on SNL


Source: https://youtu.be/XoOvN4-IY88?t=223


To Catch an Autist (it takes an Autist). I've noticed that NS has arranged the books on his shelves by color.

Which swing states could give us enough info to call the election sometime before dawn? Not PA, that's for sure.

NYT


Arizona
Lean D
Officials are not predicting the share of ballots that will be reported by Wednesday. A new law allows officials to count mail votes starting two weeks before the election, so the first votes, typically reported at 10 p.m. Eastern, are likely to be relatively stronger for Mr. Biden.

Florida
Tossup
All early voting and previously tabulated mail ballots, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Mr. Biden, should be reported by 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Officials did not make a projection for the timing of full unofficial results, but they were allowed to process early-arriving mail ballots starting weeks before the election, and reporting is expected to be fast. The supervisor of elections in Miami-Dade County has said that officials may still be counting mail ballots on Wednesday.


Georgia
Tossup
Officials did not provide an estimate but said that because of the large volume of mail ballots expected, it could take a couple of days for all of them to be scanned and counted. The secretary of state has said he expects the winners of most races to be announced by Wednesday.

North Carolina
Tossup
Early votes and processed mail ballots, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Mr. Biden, will be reported around 7:30 p.m. Election Day results, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Mr. Trump, will be reported between 8:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. As of Monday, officials estimate that 97 percent of ballots cast will be reported on election night.



Texas
Tossup
Officials say that the bulk of results will be known on election night. Because an excuse is required to vote by mail in Texas, officials do not think that processing those votes will result in delays, though increased turnout could.
Content from External Source
If Texas were called for Biden it's game over, man. Game over. But unlikely to happen by dawn because a Biden win in TX is already unlikely and would be thin.

So FL and NC are the ones to watch.
 
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I dont wish to feel again that most unpleasant churning in my mind & stomach when to a ghastly surprise individual 1 won 4 years ago. He by careful crafting consistently poisoning the well gaming the system to divide not unify & undermined truth required for democracy, i can only hope for a better & firm result but its too worrisome to even speculate..

Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster sum it up for me


lies (3).PNG
 
A useful hour-by-hour guide to when results will start to come in (Eastern Time)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/politics/poll-closing-times.html
Metabunk 2020-11-03 08-21-21.jpg

An interesting early race to watch is Senator Mitch McConnell.

WHAT TO WATCH Indiana and Kentucky won’t tell us much — Mr. Trump is expected to win both of them easily, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is expected to win easily, too.

In the unlikely event that Mr. McConnell’s Democratic challenger, Amy McGrath, becomes competitive, that could be a sign of a really bad night for Republicans. But early returns will not say much, because the polls will be open for another hour in parts of western Kentucky and Indiana that are on Central time.
Content from External Source
But the real fun starts around 8PM ET

Metabunk 2020-11-03 08-22-40.jpg

WHAT TO WATCH The last polls in Florida close at this time, as do all or most polls in three other important swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas. (Polls in far western parts of Michigan and Texas, including El Paso, are open for an additional hour.) Texas is expected to report most of its results Tuesday. But Michigan and Pennsylvania may take several days to count mail ballots, and the returns there on election night may be disproportionately Republican.
Content from External Source
With the vast turnout and the pandemic, this is a unique election, and early results might be surprising. It also makes projections more complicated, and hence might make those early results misleading.
 
Don't worry, Trumps supreme court will help iron out the discrepancies between the votes that come in after election day that'll just keep shifting the vote toward the Democrats as time moves forward.
 
I'm assuming the Democrats are going to keep their majority in the House. What's the 2021 Senate predicted to look like? If a lot of former Republican voters support Biden, but confirm Republican senators, Biden might be looking at a difficult presidency.
 
Biden might be looking at a difficult presidency.

He's looking at a difficult presidency regardless. If he tries to implement any of his campaign promises with the current covid situation, then the repubs will just dominate the midterms in 2 years. If he doesn't implement his campaign promises immediately, the left will go ballistic.

The "Dems" appear united now because they all hate Trump. but without him to rally behind, then the game changes completely.

He really can't win no matter what he does or doesnt do. It's just a bad year(s) to be running for President.
 
FYI -- North Carolinian here, we have four precincts that have been allowed to stay open later than scheduled due to problems opening on time, Under state law, no numbers can be released until all precincts are closed -- so NC won't be reporting until about 8:15, or later IF there are more extensions.

Does not appear to be any chicanery, just giving folks in those precincts who maybe could not vote first thing in the morning, due to the precincts not opening on time, a little extra time to come back and get their vote in.
 
Let's not neglect The Economist Model
https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president


Chance of winning
the electoral college
Chance of winning
the most votes
Predicted range of electoral college votes (270 to win)

Joe Biden
Democrat
better than 19 in 20
or 97%
better than 19 in 20
or >99%
259-415

Donald Trump
Republican
less than 1 in 20
or 3%
less than 1 in 20
or <1%
123-279

economist.jpg

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Our final pre-election forecast is that the Democrats are likely to win a majority in the Senate.​

Chance of controlling
the Senate
Average simulated
seat total
Predicted range of
seats (51 for majority)

Democrats
around 4 in 5
or 80%
52.2
seats
47-58

Republicans
around 1 in 5
or 20%
47.8
seats
42-53
Content from External Source
 
There's another factor. There's, historically, a fairly strong correlation between these separate elections.



You’ve got nine Republican seats that are right on the knife’s edge, minus one from Alabama that will be going the other direction.

One of the things that’s interesting about these Senate races is the toss up at the end. Over the last 11 elections close to 70% have broken one way or the other each year.

They’ve either all -- 70% have gone Democrat, 70% have gone Republican... the highest was 89%, the lowest was like 59%. But the close ones... it’s like the last little puff of air knocks them [over]. These things can get really explosive, particularly when we’re seeing as Parliamentary of voting that we’re having now. People are voting red, or they’re voting blue.
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There's an issue that's not well known, even to Americans, and that's reapportionment and redistricting, and the vital role state legislatures have upon the redistricting process. It's a recursive process which can make one party or the other dominant beyond its natural demographics on both a state level and upon the House of Representatives.


“Apportionment” refers to the allocation of representatives in legislative bodies to particular geographical units, while “districting” refers to the design of the geographically based election districts within those units. There is a clear distinction between these processes when it comes to seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Seats in the U.S. House are first apportioned to states, according to the relative size of each state’s population, through a formula contained in a federal statute (2 U.S.C.S. §2a), while the districts themselves are then designed by the individual states. The distinction between apportionment and districting at the state and local levels is blurred, however. Prior to the adoption of the “one person, one vote” requirement for representational districts at these levels, which mandates that districts be close to equal in population, counties often received specified numbers of representatives in state legislatures, and sometimes municipalities or other preexisting units were allocated seats in county legislatures. Such allocations now almost always conflict with the population equality requirement, resulting in apportionment and districting at these levels becoming essentially one process, performed by the state or locality. The expressions “reapportionment” and “redistricting,” therefore, are used interchangeably at these levels.

The revision of geographical districts to elect legislators in the United States is required after each decennial census. This enumeration of the country’s population happens every year that ends in zero. The new population counts almost always require the revision of U.S. House districts, state legislative districts, and local legislative districts in order to bring them into compliance with the population equality requirement. The purpose of this process, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, is to provide the people with “fair and effective representation” within these bodies.
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It's such a complicated issue, I've hesitated to even open the subject. But the Democrats taking state legislatures on a year that ends in zero is a huge factor in how things will go for years.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/multistate.us/production/landingpages/lZO9YmOKYwcsgtGY8/attachment/Deck_ 2020 State Elections Preview _ MultiState (last updated 11_2_20) (1).pdf

A significant number of state legislative seats — almost 80 percent — are up for election in 2020 (5,877 out of 7,383 total seats).
⬝ At present, the same party controls both chambers of the legislature in every state except two: Minnesota and Alaska. Minnesota currently has a Democratic Senate and Republican House, and Alaska has a Republican Senate with the House controlled by a coalition of Democrats and centrist Republicans.
⬝ Ten legislative chambers controlled by a Republican majority have the potential to flip to Democratic control as a result of the election. The most likely are the Republican-controlled Minnesota Senate and both the Senate and House in Arizona, which are all rated as "Lean Democratic" by CNalysis. Next likely are the Republican-controlled chambers rated as "Tilt Democratic," which are the Texas House, Iowa House, and Michigan House.
Content from External Source
This shift has already happened in my state of Nevada. Since the 2018 we have a Democratic trifecta.

Added to that is the shifting demographics. We're looking at a significant shift toward something we have not had since the early 19th century, which is a one party system.

When Texas demographically/politically shifts to a blue state, that will signal that there will be no more Republican presidents. (This is a process that includes Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, and soon Georgia.) That Texas shift was thought to be 8 years in the future, but it now looks as if 4 years is probable.

The Republicans have been holding onto a political power above their natural demographic power for three reasons:

1. The Senate gives equal power to states no matter what their population is. Two Senators per state.
2. The electoral college gives states with low populations outsized power to elect the president.
3. The Republicans were the party in power during the last reapportionment and redistricting in 2010.

The first two will remain in place. However shifting demographics in formerly solid Republican states is changing those as well.

In short, the Republican party is losing all three advantages, while American demographics continue to shift.
 
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There's some real cognitive dissonance going on with the more eccentric Republicans in California thinking that Trump will win there. They seem to be confusing the massive show of support by hundreds or thousands of people at "Trump Train" events as being indicative of some broader popular movement.

Metabunk 2020-11-03 14-47-30.jpg

The GOP polled 22% in the 2016 Presidential election LA County. I guess that means there's a lot of room to grow, but polls have consistently put Biden 30 points ahead.
Metabunk 2020-11-03 14-54-22.jpg

What will happen when these polls are shown to be roughly correct? I think we're going to have a much larger percentage of people than normal thinking the election was rigged.
 
There's another factor. There's, historically, a fairly strong correlation between these separate elections.
Yeah, but then you only elect 1/3 of your senators, so despite the Democrats winning the election 2 years ago, that wasn't enough to change the Senate majority. It kinda depends on which states have Senators up for election this year.
There's an issue that's not well known, even to Americans, and that's reapportionment and redistricting, and the vital role state legislatures have upon the redistricting process.
I think gerrymandering is in a lot of folks' vocabulary by now.

I learned today that the Republican party entered a consent decree in 1982 that expired 3 years ago, and it prohibited them to mess with the elections via "poll watchers" (then called the Ballot Security Task Force).
 
Article:
6:00 PM CET
President Trump's campaign asked at least three counties in Pennsylvania for a rundown of highly specific election security plans — including ballot storage locations and transportation details — according to an email obtained by NBC News. The Pennsylvania secretary of state has advised counties not to disclose election security information to any third parties and has reached out to the FBI.
 
Yeah, but then you only elect 1/3 of your senators, so despite the Democrats winning the election 2 years ago, that wasn't enough to change the Senate majority. It kinda depends on which states have Senators up for election this year.
Yes, it does. 2016 had many Dems defending, this year many Reps are defending. Every single seat gained changes things significantly, so the thought of picking up 6 or 7 is huge. Staggering in the political implications.
 
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It's very weird to have experienced a Trump-as-candidate election in rural California and Los Angeles. I always try to explain to Angelinos that their California is not the same as the California I was born in, and today the differences feel palpable.
I don't even know what to expect when I wake up tomorrow, but I know whatever it is it'll be interesting, both in this home and the one I left upstate.
 
There's some real cognitive dissonance going on with the more eccentric Republicans in California thinking that Trump will win there. They seem to be confusing the massive show of support by hundreds or thousands of people at "Trump Train" events as being indicative of some broader popular movement.

Metabunk 2020-11-03 14-47-30.jpg

The GOP polled 22% in the 2016 Presidential election LA County. I guess that means there's a lot of room to grow, but polls have consistently put Biden 30 points ahead.
Metabunk 2020-11-03 14-54-22.jpg

What will happen when these polls are shown to be roughly correct? I think we're going to have a much larger percentage of people than normal thinking the election was rigged.
To be fair, their leader models the exact same hasty generalization.
 
Article:
6:00 PM CET
President Trump's campaign asked at least three counties in Pennsylvania for a rundown of highly specific election security plans — including ballot storage locations and transportation details — according to an email obtained by NBC News. The Pennsylvania secretary of state has advised counties not to disclose election security information to any third parties and has reached out to the FBI.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General stated yesterday ( i think) that Biden would win Pennsylvania. basically he was using it as a dig at Trump, saying that's teh only reason Trump would try to secure voting rules in PA. but people are freaking out as if he was hinting at "rigging" or something.

Unfortunately whoever wins PA, the PA folks from the other side, are gonna be up in arms because of what the Attorney General said.
 
It's clear this isn't going to be over tonight, as we were repeatedly warned. Texas is still - incredibly - in play because of the massive, landslide vote Biden is getting in the most populous counties. But the state is still a long, long shot in the end.

AP will call AZ for Biden before dawn, which is bad for Trump. Very bad. But it's a real election now; which I'm afraid is going to drag on for days.

I'm 90% confident Trump is going to claim victory tonight, which he has no right to do. That will be very divisive.
 
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Huge surprise the NYT is predicting a 64% chance of Biden winning Georgia. I just looked at the data the NYT is using to predict this. Trump has run out of Trump counties and the remaining counties with unreported votes are heavily Biden. 91% of the vote is in and the count has stopped for the night.

For anyone who's thinking there's a nationwide polling error in favor of Trump, I give you these states:
The first number is the predicted Biden advantage according to the Real Clear Politics poll of polls, and the second number is the election vote count advantage for Biden.


AZ +0.9, +9
NM +8, +9
CO +9, +17
MN +4.3, +9

Just got word Right NOW from someone... Trump is making his victory speech.

Right now, he's the clear underdog. What an irresponsible Jackanapes.

With AZ, NV, and ME, all of which he will surely win, and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which he recently won, added to the map, Biden is only 26 votes short of winning, with WI(10), MI(16) and PA(20)
And Georgia(16) to go. Biden only needs to win any two of them. And he's favored in all of them. (If Georgia is one of the two, we're in for a bad time... worse than PA could ever be.)

These messages are from the update bar in the NYT forecast page

Trip Gabriel, in Butler County, Pa.
Erie County, Pa., counted 13,121 mail ballots, which Biden won 5 to 1. There are 37,000 mail votes still out; Dems expect him to carry them by at least 3 to 1. That means he would win this bellwether county.

and another...


Reid Epstein, in Madison, Wis.
Remember, as you see Wisconsin results come in, that in many jurisdictions the absentee ballots won’t be counted and reported until ALL the absentee ballots are counted.
Content from External Source

It's the red mirage, you see. Just as predicted.
 
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This is the Associated Press map, via Google. It'll come down to some states flipping the lead as more votes are counted if Biden is to have a chance.
image.jpeg
Also, right now it looks like the Democrats have picked up only a single Senate seat.
 
Please understand what's happening in WI, MI, and PA.
Mail ballots
The red mirage
Milwaukee
etc.

Biden is favored in all 3 of these states.
 
Biden just took the lead in WI. But a lot of Dem votes are still missing in Milwaukee and some Trump votes still out in Green Bay county but that's dwarfed by the Dem votes outstanding. Biden is now on track to win WI.
 
Article:
Trump appeared in the East Room of the White House early on Wednesday morning to claim falsely that he had already beaten Democrat Joe Biden, and the election was being stolen from him in a massive act of fraud. He vowed to mount a challenge in the Supreme Court and declared that he had already won states that were still counting votes, including Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

A short clip of that Trump speech is at the beginning of the video included on that page.Trump voting stop.jpg
[0:35] We'll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.
[..]
[0:57] We will win this. As far as I'm concerned, we already have won.
Echoes of Florida 2000.

Edit: A longer version of that CNN video was uploaded to Youtube:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovLKZFNm-8M
 
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Something strange going on in NV. NYT reporting only 937 mail ballots have been counted statewide. But there are 413,000 mail ballots in Clark County alone. I did some simple arithmetic, and sure enough the uncounted votes figure in Clark County matches that 413,000 figure. So it looks as if no mail ballots have been counted.

Which clinches NV.*

But... we had a supreme court decision against a GOP lawsuit which involved these ballots... I thought. Biden still winning without them, but christ. Talk about voter suppression. The "Because we Can Doctrine." This is the only reason NV hasn't been called and added to the Electoral map.

Glad I voted in person.

The local media here is crappy.

*Nevada is basically Clark County (Las Vegas), Washoe County (Reno) which both go Dem, and vast, empty desert counties.
 
Certainly a rollercoaster this morning (UK time). When I woke up I checked the odds on the Betfair exchange and Trump was 1.5 (i.e. 66.6% chance of victory). He went back out to 1.7, shortened to 1.4 and now the odds have basically flipped with Biden at 1.52.
 
But... we had a supreme court decision against a GOP lawsuit which involved these ballots...
Here's a source for that.
Article:
Observers of all parties are being accommodated in Las Vegas-area ballot-counting offices. But Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria testified during a court hearing last week that privacy requirements prevent over-the-shoulder monitoring of signature validation.

The case now before the state Supreme Court also seeks to stop the use of an optical scanning machine to validate voter signatures.

Gloria testified that pulling the plug on the device could endanger his ability to count all ballots before results have to be reported Nov. 16.

The appeal followed an order released Monday by Judge James Wilson Jr. in Carson City, who observed that no county in Nevada hand-counts ballots.

The Trump campaign and GOP lawsuit targeted the only Democratic-leaning county in the state. Wilson said he concluded that neither the state nor Clark County had done anything to give one person’s vote preference over another.
 
But that got settled...??? Confusing.

CNN confirming that NV has uncounted mail ballots... but why? And how many? From what I can see, it's 400,000 not tens of thousands. One GOP gambit was an attempt to shut down mail ballot counting machines, but I thought that had been nixed.



CNN - Four key battleground states -- Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia -- began Wednesday with tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted, leaving the White House race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden up in the air.

Election officials in some states, including Nevada and Georgia, called it a night and planned to resume the count in the morning, while some counties in Pennsylvania weren't even to start tabulating their mail-in votes until later Wednesday morning.

The mail-in ballots, which smashed records this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, are expected to favor Biden, whose campaign encouraged Democrats to vote early, while in-person votes on Election Day may have given Trump an advantage.

In three key states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- election officials were not allowed to begin processing absentee ballots until on or just before Election Day, after Republican-led state legislatures successfully opposed changing laws to allow earlier preparations like other states.
Content from External Source
People who aren't political junkies just aren't aware of how many mail ballots are still out there in these states, and they're like 60-70% Biden votes. It's going to look to people like they came out of nowhere... with an assist from our Dictator in Chief. That's the plan, of course.


This is why the NYT has Biden favored in Georgia...
By 10:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, Fulton County -- which is the state's largest county and includes Atlanta -- had counted all in-person votes and stopped counting mail-in ballots for the evening. Officials there plan to resume counting the absentee ballots Wednesday at 8 a.m., Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt told CNN.

Fulton County still has an estimated 48,118 absentee ballots left to count, and that doesn't include ballots received by mail on Tuesday. In neighboring DeKalb County, another Democratic stronghold, election officials there will count 79,000 absentee ballots by mail starting at 11 a.m. ET Wednesday.
Content from External Source
Trump just ran out of Trump counties. If Biden wins it would be a slim win and that can mean some bad times.


Trump is now facing almost insuperable odds. Still a slim chance. With that cockroach survival ability of his...
 
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But... we had a supreme court decision against a GOP lawsuit which involved these ballots... I thought. Biden still winning without them, but christ. Talk about voter suppression. The "Because we Can Doctrine." This is the only reason NV hasn't been called and added to the Electoral map.
I'd be a bit cautious about suggesting voter suppression based on "they haven't been counted yet." If they get counted, and the Court ruled they will be as you point out, then what order they are counted in does not change the final total -- it does create the appearance of a horse race where there is not one. If they DON'T count them that's a different story, but that has not happened yet.

Edited for a typo. Stupid small keyboard...
 
AP is now showing a Biden lead in Michigan as well, with 94% of precincts reporting. If Nevada stays blue, Biden could obtain the needed 270 electors from Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin and the states that have already been called in his favor.
Swing States AP.png
(via Google, just now https://www.google.com/search?q=us+elections )
 
I don't know (at my antipodean remove), so perhaps you have heard this a million times recently.
Jeff Bridges' news anchor character in Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom , explaining in 2013 why the USA is such a great country :
(to slightly maybe paraphrase) "Every four years we go to the fire station and overthrow the government, without any police on the street."

What a difference a Trump makes.

(yeah oops Jeff Daniels)
 
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Just for curiosity's sake, how many different ballots did you need to fill out for this election? Federally, House and Senate and President makes 3, but then there were also propositions and state-wide and local races, maybe?

In Germany, typically only the parliament gets voted on, so it's exactly one ballot for each level of government. This makes ballot counting a lot easier to manage than in the US, and it's still mostly done by volunteers. (Merkel was chosen by the parliament, and the "Senate" (Bundestag) representatives were chosen by the state governments.)
 
Just for curiosity's sake, how many different ballots did you need to fill out for this election? Federally, House and Senate and President makes 3, but then there were also propositions and state-wide and local races, maybe?
It all goes on one ballot.

For example, we (Fairfax County, Virginia) had no local or state level races this year, so the offices were the three Federal offices on one side of the ballot. The other side had two state constitution amendments and five, I think, county level bond issue questions.
 
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