Biden leading as Trump seeks to halt count
What happened
Joe Biden appeared to be closing in on the 270 electoral votes needed to become the nation’s 46th president as The Week went to press Wednesday night, with President Donald Trump demanding a recount in at least one state and vowing legal action to challenge other results. Democratic hopes for a decisive Biden win were dashed on election night, as Trump defied polls in state after state, posting early wins in Florida, Ohio, and Iowa. But as counting continued into Wednesday, Biden took Wisconsin and Michigan and held narrow leads in Arizona and Nevada. He remained competitive in Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania—where he was down by nearly a quarter million votes, but where 1 million mailin ballots, thought to heavily favor him, awaited counting. “They are finding Biden votes all over the place!” Trump tweeted. In an election with record turnout, Biden tallied 70.7 million votes as of Wednesday—the most of any presidential candidate in history—to Trump’s 67.7 million. “When the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” Biden said.
Speaking from the White House, Trump declared victory and called the vote counting “a fraud on the American people.” He vowed to petition the Supreme Court to intervene in the states, though there’s no legal mechanism for his campaign to appeal directly to the high court. Campaign manager Bill Stepien said the campaign would seek a recount in Wisconsin, where Trump trailed by about 1 percentage point, and would file suit to stop the counting of ballots in Michigan and Pennsylvania. “If we count all legal ballots, the president wins,” said Stepien.
Despite wide concerns about potential violence and voter intimidation that had law enforcement officials on high alert, Election Day unfolded without serious incident. As expected, Biden polled well among urban voters, suburban women, young voters, African-Americans, and college graduates; Trump expanded his edge with white rural voters and did surprisingly well with Hispanics. (See Controversy.) In exit polling, voters who cited the economy as the most important issue heavily favored Trump, while those who cited the coronavirus pandemic leaned toward Biden.
What the editorials said
Trump’s “laughably ignorant” claims to the contrary, counting always goes on past Election Day, said the Los Angeles Times. Biden’s late-rising numbers had been widely predicted as mail ballots were counted, but Trump falsely claimed they were “suspicious.” The record turnout was a tribute to Americans’ engagement in this pivotal election, and we must count every vote.
“So much for the landslide,” said The Wall Street Journal. While the winner is still up in the air, it’s clear “the biggest early losers are the pollsters.” The failure of the anticipated blue wave “reminds us that democracy is surprising, and humility is good journalism practice.” We’ll long be talking about where the pollsters and pundits went wrong, but we’d bet one factor was a strong pre-pandemic economy that “lifted wages for low-skilled workers.”
What the columnists said
Let’s face it, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post, “political polling is a fraud.” Pollsters’ “seductive promise” is to make a science of “understanding a complex and changing set of circumstances.” But after the third election in which Florida polling was “almost comically wrong”—this time, by 7 to 9 points—it’s clear they claim to quantify something that “cannot accurately be measured.” Why do we keep listening?
For progressives, the closeness of this election is “shocking,” said Michael Tomasky in The Daily Beast: “We couldn’t fathom” that anyone could look at Trump’s “train wreck of a record” and sign up for more. With nearly a quarter of a million dead from a bungled pandemic and four years of norm-shattering, incompetence, and corruption, “the idea that 70-something million people could vote for this man is beyond belief.” In the end it came down to tribalism, said Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post. Trump’s unshakable support points to one of his great achievements: “turning huge swaths of the country against nuanced fact and toward the comforting simplicity of tribe.”
Trump’s disgraceful, evidence-free claims of fraud represent “the gravest of threats to the stability of the country,” said Dan Balz in The Washington Post. He’s “given his followers license to see anything other than a Trump victory as a stolen election.” The damage “cannot be overstated.”
“Blindsided” Democrats should do some soul-searching, said Jim Geraghty in NationalReview.com. Maybe it’s time to “stop assuming that they have African-Americans and Latinos locked up,” stop calling opponents racists and demonizing pro-lifers, acknowledge a difference between legal and illegal immigration, and call a riot a riot. And here’s the “craziest thought of all”: Maybe they should try to talk to and understand people who disagree with them instead of dismissing them as deplorables. After all, Trump voters make up about half the country.