The Real Story of the 2020 Election
Everything you need to know for Monday, Nov. 2: Never forgive the vote suppressors + play the PRIMER election forecast game!
Hey, y’all. As always, thank you for reading.
I’ve been tied up with some other work/anxiously biting my fingernails to the nub/numbing my nerves with whiskey this weekend, so I’m doing something a little different today. The bulk of today’s newsletter is my final pre-election column, which looks at the many, many, many ways malignant actors sought to deprive their perceived political adversaries of the right to vote. For those of you who also subscribe to Informed Dissent, I apologize for the redundancy.
Fingers crossed and fetal position assumed,
JCB
Monday, Nov. 2, 2020
🚨🚨🚨 THE ELECTION IS TOMORROW. THE ELECTION IS TOMORROW 🚨🚨🚨
Polls are open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. If you are in line at 7:30 p.m., stay there.
Find your polling place here.
You DO NOT need an ID to vote.
If you have not returned your absentee ballot yet, you should probably do so in person at the county board of elections office or vote in person on Tuesday.
Today’s Numbers:
50,908
The number of likely voters surveyed for the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (previously the CCES), one of the largest pre-election polls around, conducted on behalf of political science academics. (Most quality polls have likely voter Ns of ~800.)
Oh, you’d like to know what it found?
That’s 51–43 Biden.
For comparison, the 2016 version had Hillary Clinton up 43–39 (final: Clinton 48–45.9): “The race could go either way,” Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, the survey’s leader, said then. “Hillary Clinton has a definite lead nationwide, but the race is very close in many of the battleground states. Clinton really needs to win Pennsylvania.”
Since this poll is large enough for subsamples to matter:
The only age group Trump is winning is seniors (53–44).
Biden is only losing whites 49–45 and men 47–48—really good numbers for a Democrat.
6% of “very conservative” and 11% of “conservative” voters say they’re backing Biden. (For comparison, 4% of “very liberal” and 5% of “liberal” voters are backing Trump, and if you are out there, I WOULD LIKE A WORD WITH YOU.)
Biden is winning across all income levels.
HOWEVER, among whites, Biden is only winning $100K-and-up voters.
Biden is winning the ’burbs 53–42 and cities 63–31.
Among those who didn’t vote or voted for a third-party candidate in 2016, Biden is winning 56–27.
Those who know someone who has had COVID back Biden 57–37; those who don’t back Trump 51–44.
Those who have lost a job in the last year back Biden 61–30.
Finally, check out this graphic: education and gender among whites.
There’s also a subsample from North Carolina (and other swing states). Here, the CES finds:
Biden 49–45
Biden is winning the Black vote 86–9, Trump is winning the white vote 54–41
Biden is winning cities 65–28 and the suburbs 53–42; Trump is winning the rural areas 57–37 and towns 51–43.
3,611,179
The number of North Carolina residents who voted early in-person, as of 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 1 (with 90 minutes before early voting ended), according to the State Board of Elections.
934,269
The number of North Carolina voters who cast absentee ballots by mail as of 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 1.
62
Percentage of registered North Carolina voters who have already voted as of 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 1.
426,485
The number of North Carolina voters who requested absentee ballots but have not returned it as of Nov. 1. For their ballot to be counted, it must be postmarked by 5 p.m. on Nov. 3 and received no later than Nov. 12 (if you trust the Supreme Court, which maybe you shouldn’t).
Let’s Do a Contest!
Okay, not a contest, as I don’t exactly have prizes. But I am curious to see your answers—and who can get the election results closest to the pin.
So, shoot me an email with your answers by, say, 7 a.m. tomorrow, and we’ll see how things shake out. Ready?
Part 1. Predictions
Who will win the presidential election, and what will the national popular vote be (percentages to one decimal)?
What will the Electoral College results be? (Go here and send me a link to your best guess.)
Who will control the US Senate and with how many seats?
Who will win the presidential contest in North Carolina, and what will the results be (percentages to one decimal)?
Who will win the US Senate contest in North Carolina, and what will the results be (percentages to one decimal)?
Who will win the governor’s race in North Carolina, and what will the results be (percentages to one decimal)?
What will North Carolina’s turnout be (in % of registered voters?
Part 2. Questions
In the entire country, which non-presidential politician do you most want to see lose?
Same question, but in North Carolina?
In the entire country, which non-presidential politician do you most want to see win?
Same question, but in North Carolina?
Nationally, what will be the biggest surprise on election night?
What about in North Carolina?
Which local candidate (as in, not running for state office) has really impressed you this year?
I’ll publish my answers in tomorrow’s newsletter, along with some responses to the questions in Part 2. We won’t have the final numbers for Part 1 until North Carolina certifies its election on Nov. 24, so we’ll return to the question of the best election Nostradamus then.
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> The Real Story of the 2020 Election
If I had to guess, this shitshow of an election will probably conclude in a rather predictable fashion. After all, if you ignore the day-to-day palpitations and take a long view, the contest looks remarkably steady.
Donald Trump started behind. He remained behind all year. Nothing changed. Headed into the campaign’s final weekend, he was down nine. So if on Tuesday night—or given the deluge of absentee ballots, Wednesday or Thursday or Friday—the networks declare Joe Biden the winner with a 52–46 margin and a little over 320 electoral votes, we’ll nod and go, “That makes sense.”
Of course, as the hymn taught us: once bitten, twice shy.
As we learned four years ago, polling errors happen. One of this magnitude would be unprecedented. But this is an unprecedented election: The first held during a pandemic. The first in which a majority of votes will be cast before Election Day. And, most important, the first in which the president has made clear his intention to challenge legal votes in the hope that judges he appointed will declare him the winner.
“We’ll see what happens at the end of [Election Day],” Trump said Thursday. “Hopefully, it won’t go longer than that. Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after Nov. 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.”
No law requires ballots to be counted, or winners declared, on Election Day. In fact, many states wait more than a month before certifying their results. The only thing different this year is that lots of people voted by mail, which means lots of ballots will get counted after Election Day. Since Democrats used absentee ballots far more than Republicans, what looks like a swing-state win for Trump on Tuesday could turn into a decisive Biden victory by Friday—the so-called blue shift.
That’s why Trump wants to shut it down.
Imagine that the Electoral College comes down to Pennsylvania. By state law, counties can’t begin counting absentee ballots until Election Day. Trump is almost certain to ahead when the initial returns come in. When the blue shift happens, which it will, the president will cry fraud and demand that officials stop counting votes—especially absentee ballots that trickle in a day or two after the election. His campaign will sue. The case will go to the Supreme Court, where four justices have signaled they’d at least toss the late arrivals—and that doesn’t include Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation Republicans rushed through explicitly for this purpose.
That’s just one disaster scenario. There are a hundred others. Absent a landslide, Republicans will besiege the courts with lawsuits to disqualify ballots. Already, the GOP has spent $20 million on more than 300 lawsuits either attacking state laws designed to make voting easier or fighting efforts to expand ballot access.
In North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Republicans asked the Supreme Court to overturn absentee-ballot-deadline extensions. They succeeded in Wisconsin, and Justice Samuel Alito invited Pennsylvania Republicans to try again after the election. In Michigan, Republicans convinced state courts to uphold a state law requiring absentee ballots to be returned by Election Day. In Minnesota, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit demanding that the state segregate all absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day, a forerunner to trying to get them disqualified; ludicrously, two Republican appointees on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals—including a Trump appointee deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association over his “temperament issues” and “partisan loyalty”—agreed. In Nevada, the Trump campaign sued to stop absentee votes from being counted so that it could challenge ballot signatures, a capricious and arbitrary standard. Then the state party filed a separate lawsuit, seeking to bog down elections officials with demands for vote-counting information.
PA Republicans got their state Supreme Court to ban “naked ballots,” or absentee ballots not placed in secrecy envelopes, which election officials worry might disenfranchise as many as 100,000 people. In Iowa, Republican legislators changed the law to make the absentee ballot application process more difficult, then the Trump campaign sued to disqualify 64,000 applications.
In Alabama, Republicans convinced the Supreme Court to uphold a state ban on curbside voting following a lawsuit by groups representing the elderly and disabled. Republicans in Texas successfully fought to keep in place restrictions on who could vote absentee, and less successfully tried to get drive-through ballots tossed in Harris County—i.e., the heavily Democratic Houston. After being twice rejected by the Republican state Supreme Court, however, Republicans sought an emergency injunction in federal court, again trying to disenfranchise 125,000 Harris County voters just before the election.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott also limited each county to one ballot collection box, a move plainly intended to inconvenience urban areas. Ohio’s secretary of state signed a similar order limiting each county to one collection box; after a court struck it down, he amended the rule, allowing counties to have multiple boxes, provided they were all directly outside of the counties’ elections offices. That decision is now tied up in federal courts. The Trump campaign sought to limit Pennsylvania’s use of drop boxes, as well, but the courts said no.
(And I haven’t even mentioned how the Supreme Court signed off on Florida’s poll tax for ex-felons. Or how the Y’all Qaeda crowd in Texas tried to drive a Biden-Harris bus off the road. Or how the racist sheriff of Alamance County had his Blackshirts pepper-spray Black people—including children!—as they were marching to an early voting site on Saturday.)
Seriously, this is how they dress for a march to the polls.
I could go on, but you’re probably sensing a theme.
Every time, it’s the same story: Voting by mail, they say, has “the potential for widespread, scalable abuse.” That’s false, but who cares. We know that actual absentee voter fraud is vanishingly rare, but that’s beside the point. The argument is pretextual.
“It is deeply disturbing that—virtually everywhere—the concerted litigation strategy of the GOP is to make sure that fewer votes count,” the conservative writer David French observed on Thursday, one of few conservatives to acknowledge this obvious fact.
If we’re lucky, the margin of victory will be large enough to avoid the constitutional crisis Trump seems eager to provoke, and the conclusion to this four-year nightmare will prove graciously anti-climactic.
But even if that’s the case, we shouldn’t lose sight of the real story of 2020: The Republican Party tried to disenfranchise millions of people to maintain its grip on power, and its allies in the federal judiciary were more than willing to play ball.
Just because a coup fails doesn’t make it forgivable. As important, this crime against democracy must never be forgotten—no matter how furiously today’s Trump sycophants try to scrub away the stink tomorrow.