Biden expresses confidence that he is “on track to win this election”

Here is how the map stands:

WASHINGTON POST, DAILY 202

Democratic nominee Joe Biden expressed confidence early Wednesday that he is “on track to win this election” but told supporters just before 1 a.m. that they should be patient and wait for all votes to be counted. “It ain’t over till every vote is counted,” he said.

“There was one clear echo from 2016: The three Northern states that secured Trump’s victory — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — appeared poised to play the decisive role again this year,” Dan Balz writes. 

Biden patched up the Blue Wall, but he failed to rebuild Obama’s coalition

Barack Obama was so successful in Wisconsin that he obscured how truly competitive the state has long been. The former president won by 14 points in 2008 and seven points in 2012. Then Hillary Clinton lost there by 0.8 percent in 2016. Joe Biden is projected to win Wisconsin this year by 0.6 percent.

Four years ago, Donald Trump carried Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined total of 77,744 votes. These three states were considered part of what political strategists and academics called “the Blue Wall” because no Republican had won them since 1988. 

Biden, 77, is a retro politician who ran a retro campaign. The central promise of, and rationale for, his candidacy during the Democratic primaries was that he could rebuild the Blue Wall by appealing to voters from places like his childhood hometown of Scranton, Pa., who had supported Obama and him in 2008 and 2012 before defecting to Trump.

Biden won back some number of the fabled Obama-Trump voters, but that does not appear to be the primary explanation for his victories in Wisconsin and Michigan – nor why his campaign is so confident that Pennsylvania will break his way once all the votes are counted from in and around Philadelphia. Biden’s inability to recreate the coalition that allowed Obama to twice carry Ohio illustrates the ongoing realignment in American politics.

While Biden fixated on rebuilding the Blue Wall, knocking down what has been part of the Red Wall might be what puts him over the top. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to carry Arizona or Georgia. Biden’s lead narrowed overnight in Arizona while Trump’s lead in Georgia shrank. 

In Georgia, Trump leads Biden by 18,540 votes out of more than 4.8 million cast. There are about 60,000 ballots that still need to be counted.

In Arizona, Biden’s lead shrunk to about 68,000 votes early this morning out of more than 2.8 million cast when Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, released more results. “Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said during an interview on NBC that her state has just under 450,000 ballots left to count, and analysts said Trump would need to win about 57 percent of those to catch Biden,” per John Wagner. “That’s about the percentage Trump won in the latest batch from Maricopa, but some of the batches remaining will come from Democratic-leaning counties in which Biden had sizable leads.” 

Biden held rallies in Georgia and Arizona, but advisers say he never went to Texas (which no Democrat has carried since Jimmy Carter in 1976) because he did not want to get distracted from the Blue Wall states. The Biden campaign spent about $170 million to run ads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, compared to $58 million in Arizona and Texas. Unlike the Sun Belt, the demographics of the Great Lakes States have not significantly changed in recent years. (While we often call this area the Rust Belt, many people who are from there hate that term. They prefer that these states be referred to as the Industrial Midwest.)  The former vice president noted that he leads in the popular vote by about 3 million during a subdued speech on Wednesday afternoon in Wilmington, Del. He observed that, with more than 70 million votes, more people just voted for him than other candidate for public office in U.S. history. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won. But I am here to report, when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” he said. Even as he projected confidence and sought to project an aura of inevitability, Biden remained focused on the Blue Wall. “With all of the votes counted, we have won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, virtually the same margin that President Trump won that state four years ago,” he said in his brief remarks. “In Michigan, we lead by over 35,00 votes and it's growing, a substantially bigger margin than President Trump won Michigan in 2016. … And I feel very good about Pennsylvania. Virtually all of the remaining ballots to be counted were cast by mail, and we've been winning 78 percent of the votes by mail in Pennsylvania.” Indeed, Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania declined by hundreds of thousands of votes on Wednesday as ballots were counted from suburban and medium-sized cities around the state, as well as Pittsburgh. “About 200,000 votes remain in Philadelphia, where Biden has captured almost 80 percent of the votes so far,” Harry Stevens, Adrian Blanco and Dan Keating report. “Relatively few votes are uncounted in the strong Republican rural areas. Almost half of the uncounted votes are in suburbs and medium cities where the mail-in ballots remaining to be counted may break Democratic.”  Black voters could save Biden again, just as they did in South Carolina's primary. “Nationally, Black voters overwhelmingly backed Biden by a margin of 87 percent to Trump’s 12 percent, according to exit polls,” Amy Wang, Vanessa Williams and Reis Thebault report. “Black voters were also galvanized this year by protests for racial justice following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In Kenosha, Wis., the August police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black father of three, sparked widespread unrest in the city. ‘I feel it all came to a head with what happened in Kenosha,' said Fayomi ‘Femi’ Agbongbon, a nursing assistant from Milwaukee who was active in get-out-the-vote efforts targeting her fellow health-care workers in the state, many of them people of color. … ‘We showed up to the polls.’” One advantage Biden had over Clinton was the benefit of hindsight. She did not understand until the 11th hour how close the Blue Wall states would become. Bafflingly, she never visited Wisconsin in 2016. Not once. To make amends, Democrats scheduled their quadrennial national convention for Milwaukee this summer. Biden accepted the nomination remotely because of concerns about the coronavirus. But even as Wisconsin became one of the worst covid-19 hot spots in the country during the last few weeks, Biden still made a point to fly in for three visits. Wisconsin seems destined to stay close in future elections. Four of the last six presidential races in the Badger State have now been decided by less than a percentage point. George W. Bush only lost Wisconsin in 2000 by 0.2 percent and in 2004 by 0.4 percent. In fact, Obama is the only presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984 – the last Republican before Trump to carry Wisconsin – who garnered more than 50 percent of the vote. Ultimately, though, a win is a win. And here is one clever way to think about Biden’s potential path to victory:

Exit polling showed covid-19 trailed the economy as the No. 1 concern for voters.

“About 2 in 10 voters said the pandemic that has left more than 232,000 Americans dead and upended life around the globe was the most important issue on their minds as they selected a president … About the same number cited racial inequality,” Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach report. “But about one-third said they were primarily motivated by the economy, including 6 in 10 of the voters who supported Trump. … A slight majority of voters said it is more important to contain the coronavirus now, even if the necessary measures hurt the economy. About 4 in 10 said the economy is more important, even if restoring the nation’s economic health hamstrings efforts to limit the spread of the virus. …

“Nearly 89,000 new infections were reported Tuesday, bringing the U.S. total to more than 9.3 million cases. The virus continued its surge through the Midwest and Plains states. Seven states set records for hospitalizations of patients with covid-19 … including Indiana, Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin."

• A new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association showed a surge of infections among children: There were 61,447 new cases among kids in the week ending Oct. 29, the largest spike of any week since the pandemic began.
• Hospitals in the St. Louis and Omaha metropolitan areas have started rescheduling elective surgeries to free up beds, while the head of the Arkansas Hospital Association said at a briefing Tuesday that the state was facing a critical shortage of health-care workers as states furiously compete for nurses.
• Oxford University hopes to present its vaccine’s late-stage trial results this year, raising hopes that Britain could start rolling out a successful vaccine in late December or early 2021. (Reuters)

The size of Trump’s Florida victory, powered by Latinos, surprised Democrats.

The president's win can be attributed to his inroads among Latinos in Miami-Dade County. Trump lost the county by 30 points in 2016. On Tuesday, he kept his deficit to the single digits, percentage wise. Four years ago, 62 percent of Latinos in the state backed Hillary Clinton, with just 35 percent voting for Trump. This year, Biden held a much narrower edge among the state’s Latino voters, just 52 percent to 47 percent in preliminary exit poll results, Jocelyn Kiley reports. Trump improved his performance among voters ages 30-44 as well: This group went for Clinton in 2016 but roughly split their votes between Biden and Trump this year. Notably, consistent with pre-election surveys, Trump lost some ground among older voters in the Sunshine State compared with four years ago.

“Trump’s campaign went from largely ignoring Hispanic voters in 2016 to making them a focus of his 2020 campaign,” the Miami Herald reports. "Within weeks of his inauguration, Trump began making overtures to Cuban Americans in Miami, rolling back [Barack Obama’s] normalization of relations with Cuba’s communist government and warning of the specter of socialism coming to the U.S. … Trump consolidated much of the Cuban-American vote, winning over not only older, more conservative exiles, but also new arrivals who’d leaned toward Obama in 2012. … Trump also made inroads with Latino voters who hail from other parts of Latin America, including Venezuela and Colombia, as he consistently campaigned against the specter of socialism.”

Analysts faulted the Biden campaign for treating the Latino community like a monolith. “‘Latinos’ are not a single electorate; their political attitudes diverge based on where they live, ancestry, [education], income, gender, faith, etc." tweeted Jose Del Real. “There’s endless political differences between Cubanos, Mexicanos, Argentinos, Dominicanos, Central Americans,” Esmeralda Bermudez wrote. “Please think twice before you lump Latinos into a single category and stop chasing the ‘Latino vote’ unicorn each election," she said of the Los Angeles Times.

Several ballot measures to loosen drug laws passed. 

Voters in New Jersey and Arizona approved a constitutional amendment to legalize recreational marijuana, ABC News reports, while South Dakota passed legalized medical use. Mississippi voters approved an initiative to establish a medical marijuana program for patients with debilitating conditions. D.C., meanwhile, appeared to approve a ballot question to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, Justin Wm. Moyer reports. And Oregon became the first state in the nation to decriminalize possession of small accounts of street drugs, including heroin and cocaine, per the Oregonian.

• Abortion rights were on the ballot in two states. In Colorado, voters rejected Proposition 115, which would’ve banned late-term abortions. In Louisiana, voters passed Amendment 1, which would add language to the state constitution stating that it does not recognize a right to an abortion. (Samantha Schmidt and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux)
• Mississippi voters approved a new state flag design with a magnolia flower on a blue background and red and yellow outer stripes — retiring a 126-year-old banner that featured the Confederate battle emblem. (Meryl Kornfield)
• Californians passed Proposition 22, which would exempt gig-economy giants Uber, Lyft and DoorDash from reclassifying their drivers as employees. The companies, along with Postmates and Instacart, spent around $200 million in support of the proposal, which allows them to bypass a state law intended to provide benefits and job protections for their drivers. (WSJ)
• Voters in Arizona passed Proposition 208, an income tax surcharge to provide more money for public schools. (Arizona Republic)
• Floridians passed Amendment 2, which would raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour next September and then increase it by $1 annually until it reaches $15 in 2026. (NYT)
• Rhode Island passed Question 1, which removes “Providence Plantations” from the state’s official name. (Providence Journal)

The civil unrest feared in the nation's capital did not materialize.

“A carnival-like atmosphere pervaded the streets around the White House early Tuesday night, but the scene gradually grew more tense and gave way to moments of friction as the outcome of the election remained in flux … Just a handful of supporters of Trump were among the crowd,” Joe Heim, Rachel Chason, Kyle Swenson and Justin Jouvenal report. “At one point, there was a tussle between police and a man who was at Black Lives Matter Plaza, though it was not immediately clear what prompted it. In a separate incident, video posted to social media showed two men wrestling on the ground at the plaza."