So far ahead, yet still so close
President Trump’s detractors hoped for a repudiation, a decisive democratic verdict putting a period on a dark chapter of American politics. What they got was more like a semicolon; Joe Biden might defeat him, but it will be a narrow victory that serves mainly to illustrate the nation’s divisions. Trump might be on his way out, but the vote showed that Trumpism is here to stay. Right?
That narrative certainly took hold throughout cable television and social media in the hours after the nation’s polls closed and the very partial results began to arrive. But while the ultimate result won’t be clear for days or weeks, it’s already evident that this election may well not look so close in the final analysis.
The murkiest aspect of the results, and the one that drove much of the premature punditry, is the increasingly antipopular Electoral College. While Biden’s chances of accumulating the 270 electoral votes needed to win are verging on insurmountable, his total could change given paperthin margins and uncertainties about the remaining ballots in a few states.
But if his current advantages hold as expected, the former vice president will be the first candidate to oust a sitting president since Bill Clinton, who did so in 1992 with no small assistance from thirdparty candidate Ross Perot. He will have reassembled the Democrats’ Midwestern “blue wall” while making historic inroads into the Sun Belt.
A Democrat hasn’t carried Arizona or Georgia since Clinton 28 years ago. Excluding that anomalous threeman race and native Georgian Jimmy Carter’s runs in 1976 and 1980, Georgia and Arizona haven’t gone Democratic since 1960 and 1948, respectively.
Biden is also leading in enough states to give him over 300 electoral votes, a total much like the one Trump has absurdly boasted about for the past four years.
Where their results are more likely to diverge dramatically is in the popular vote. While Trump got 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, a deficit of 2.1 percentage points, Biden as of Friday was leading the popular tally by over 4.1 million, about 2.8 percentage points. That figure is likely to grow over the coming days as many more ballots are counted in California, New York and other states that favored the Democratic nominee.
With more than 74 million votes and an outright majority of 50.5%, Biden has also broken the popular vote record set by his former running mate, Barack Obama, in 2008.
Further strengthening his potential mandate, Biden won the popular verdict amid extraordinary voter turnout that could break marks set more than a century ago by approaching twothirds of Americans eligible to vote.
Granted, this was no landslide. And because of the mixed congressional result, this was not the sort of “blue wave” that hit in 2018 — another result that didn’t become clear until well after election day. Nor, however, does it look likely to turn out nearly as close as 2000, 2004 or even 2016. Biden’s victory could go down as one of the more decisive in recent U. S. history.
In that light, it should be seen as yet another unnecessary warning about the antidemocratic Electoral College, whose dangers were further underscored by suggestions that Trumpfriendly legislatures might take advantage of it to overturn the popular will within battleground states. With relatively minuscule shifts in a few battleground states, this election could go against another popular vote victory, and one substantially greater than Clinton’s or Al Gore’s. That would mean three of our supposed democracy’s past six presidential elections had failed to go to the candidate with the most votes.