If you managed to go to sleep last night, unlike the numbers guys, here’s how things are looking overnight. Joe Biden has inched closer to the magic number of 270 electoral votes with the Associated Press’s calls of Wisconsin and Michigan. Adding them to the Biden ledger gives him 264 electoral votes, just six shy of the presidency. There are a handful of states that are still counting mail-in and provisional ballots and remain uncalled: Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and, depending, on which outlet you ask, Arizona. North Carolina appears set to go for Trump. The AP has called Arizona for Biden, so we’re leaving its 11 electoral votes in the win column for Biden as part of his 264-vote haul so far, but a number of outlets, including the New York Times, still have it in the undecided column. There are some ominous signs that the race could tighten, namely that there are more mail-in ballots than expected in areas that Trump performs well. The count continues. Problematically for Trump’s absurd “Stop the Count” calls in other states is the fact that Arizona’s late mail-in ballots favor Trump. Biden currently has a 2-plus point, 70,000-vote lead in the state.
If Arizona holds for Biden, which still seems more likely than not, the most direct way for Biden to wrap this race up could come in a few short hours in Nevada, where the state Secretary of State is set to give a Thursday morning press conference announcing updated results. If Biden’s less than 10,000-vote lead there holds up with the addition of the last uncounted mail-in ballots, you could see some outlets begin calling the race for him as the projected winner. Given the tenuousness of the situation in Arizona, however, that call might not come until the dust settles a bit more.
It will be some time before the race is truly settled, given the rhetoric and downpour of lawsuits expected from Trump campaign, but a call for Biden and a growing consensus that he is the winner will make it harder for Trump to claim victory—even if it does activate the most virulent part of his supporter base to literally lose their minds and claim that counting the votes that were cast is somehow a form of cheating.
Adding to the irony of GOP objections to vote counting is that in Maricopa County, Arizona, where mail-in ballots could be Trump’s last chance, 150 Trump protesters, some armed, showed up Wednesday night chanting: “Count the vote!”
With or without Arizona and Nevada, a win in Pennsylvania would wrap up the race for Biden and the forecasting bros are now speculating—wondering aloud?—if, given the narrowness of the margins in the Southwest, if Pennsylvania will announce ultimately first and tip the race to Biden. And the outlook in Pennsylvania is looking increasingly good for Biden:
And then there’s Georgia. The margin has shrunk to less than 20,000 votes—leaving less than .5 percent separating the candidates—with the bulk of remaining, uncounted mail-in ballots coming from the Atlanta and Savannah metro areas, both expected to be Biden strongholds. Biden looks like he’s en route to winning Georgia, a state Democrats haven’t won since 1992.
The way things are headed Thursday morning, Day 3 of the election, Biden is on the verge of winning the presidency.
And that win, no matter what Democrats’ hopes and dreams were going into the election, is significant.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2I7xoEC
via IFTTT
沒有留言:
張貼留言