Campaign comes to an end
In 2020 finale, Trump talks about rigged election, Biden emphasizes pandemic; 93 million votes already cast Will we know winner of the presidential election before bedtime tonight?
Take a deep breath: Election Day is finally here. But don’t exhale just yet. Never has it been more uncertain when or how we will know the winners.
Don’t expect conciliatory concession speeches tonight, but do expect prognosticators and pundits to spend an immense amount of time in front of snazzy graphics drilling down on incoming vote tallies in places such as Erie County, Pennsylvania, and Dade County, Florida.
With Democrat Joe Biden steadily ahead in most polls, Florida, Pennsylvania and other “tooclose-to- call” battleground states all play an outsize role tonight in understanding whether President Donald Trump can pull off a reelection victory. Whether Democrats can take control of the Senate may
come down to swing states Georgia and Arizona.
Even from our perch on the West Coast three time zones away from some of the biggest action, Californians may not have a clear picture of who wins the White House before they go to bed unless Biden builds a formidable lead in key states such as Florida that don’t wait until the polls close to begin counting mail-in ballots.
Because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, millions of people already have mailed or dropped off completed ballots instead of voting in person today. According to the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida, more than 95 million people — or roughly 70% of the total votes counted during the last presidential election in 2016 — already had cast their ballots by Monday morning.
In California, where the state’s 22 million registered voters were each mailed a ballot, nearly 12 million people had voted — nearly 80% of 2016’s total, disproportionately Democrats.
“You have most of the country literally in a panic mode,” said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist and veteran poll watcher. “The consequences of that may lead to the president’s undoing because we’re seeing incredible turnout.”
But don’t assume all that early voting means we’ll have a winner on election night. Despite Trump’s assertion that a winner should be declared Nov. 3 and that counting ballots after that date is inappropriate, states have counted ballots well after the polls close for years.
According to a New York Times survey of all 50 states, just eight states expect to have 98% or more of their unofficial results reported by 9 a. m. PST Wednesday. In California, ballots that arrive as late as Nov. 20 will be counted as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. And in some swing states, such as Georgia, ballots aren’t counted until the polls close. So what does that mean? “People are going to need to have patience,” elections expert and UC Irvine professor Rick Hasen said during an October webinar on voting.
It is possible that media outlets will declare a winner tonight because enough of the votes are counted in key states, but the official results will take days or even weeks. In California, counties have until Dec. 3 to certify their results to the state.
How could outlets declare a winner early? It all comes down to the Electoral College. To win, Biden or Trump will need 270 electoral votes.
Populous states have more electoral votes. Some states consistently go either blue or red. For instance, Biden is a shoo-in in California, so just after the polls close here at 8 p.m., expect the networks to add the Golden State’s 55 electoral votes into the Biden column. Tennessee and Indiana, with 11 votes each, will almost certainly go to Trump. But this year, once-reliably red Texas, with 38 votes, is a toss-up. And if enough votes are in election night for analysts to call populous swing states such as Florida, with 29 electoral votes, it could be possible to project a winner.
That may happen. Election workers have been tallying votes in Florida, where polls close at 5 p.m. PST, for the last month and nearly as many people had voted there by Monday morning as voted in the entire 2016 election. Texas, where polls close at 6 p.m. PST, has already crossed that threshold, and most counties are expected to report early vote tallies shortly after the polls close.
A word of caution: States post early results that are incomplete and then update them as more ballots are counted. Traditionally, Republicans have voted early and Democrats have lined up at the polls on Election Day. This year, the reverse is true, meaning early results could skew very blue and level out as more day of Republican votes are tallied.
In other words, especially for down-ballot races where the outcome is less certain, a candidate could go from appearing to be the winner early on to losing easily.
And, a la 2000, there are likely to be legal challenges in at least some places. In Texas, there’s already been a dispute about whether to throw out more than 100,000 ballots cast at drive-thru sites.
“I think there’s an assumption that there’ll be lawsuits in just about every state that could possibly matter,” Sragow said, adding that cases could be helped by conservative courts sympathetic to the president.
For now, at the national level, our best sense of whether Trump will win another four years or whether Biden will pull out a victory is polling. Nationally, polls show Biden with a roughly 9-point lead, according to FiveThirtyEight. And even if the polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was projected to win, Biden would still likely claim victory.
“The country in general but certainly Democrats are scared that something terrible is going to happen. That fear, that PTSD, has been exploited by the president. Irrespective of what you think of him, he thrives by keeping people off balance,” Sragow said. “If you just employ your common sense, the only conclusion you can come to is this is going to be a blue wave.”
Is it possible for Trump to win? Yes, absolutely, but according to a forecast from FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, Trump’s chances hover around 10%. Silver is paying close attention to Pennsylvania. His forecast has it going to Biden, but if the state’s 20 electoral votes went to Trump, his chance of victory would increase.
It could take awhile to count votes in Pennsylvania, though — mail-in ballots can’t be processed there until Election Day, and some counties will actually wait until the next day to get to mail-in ballots.