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- Several key states in the presidential election remain too close or too early to call, as President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are locked in a very close race. The election could come down to Pennsylvania and Arizona. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
- Biden had hoped for a decisive victory, buoyed by strong showings in Southern states like Florida and North Carolina. That did not happen — Trump won Florida by a greater margin than in 2016, and he leads in North Carolina and Georgia, though neither has been called. [CNN / Stephen Collinson and Maeve Reston]
- Democrats had even thought they had an outside chance to flip Texas, which has been reliably red for several decades. But Trump won rather decisively there, and won with relative ease in Ohio and Iowa. The result: There was no clear repudiation of the Trump administration. [Washington Post / Monica Hesse]
- Biden still has more paths to 270 electoral votes than Trump, however. He won Wisconsin and Michigan and is leading in Arizona, all states Trump carried in 2016. His campaign is also optimistic about his chances in Pennsylvania and Nevada. [NYT / Reid J. Epstein and Glenn Thrush]
- The path for Trump involves holding on to both Pennsylvania and Arizona, states he would need if Biden wins in Nevada. In remarks early Wednesday morning, Trump falsely claimed he had already won the election, even though many votes remain to be counted. [MSNBC / Steve Benen]
- Biden made remarks earlier in the evening from his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, expressing confidence that he would win but saying it is not his or Trump’s place to declare a winner. “We’re feeling good about where we are,” he said. [WHYY / Mark Eichmann]
- Trump has continued to make baseless claims about voter fraud issues with mail-in ballots, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Down by roughly 20,000 votes in Wisconsin with all but 1,000 or so counted, the president demanded a recount in the state. [The Hill / Morgan Chalfant]
- This was not the “blue wave” election that many Democrats were hoping for and the polls suggested was a real possibility. Cuban Americans in the Miami area helped deliver Florida to Trump, and the president also did well among Hispanic voters in Texas. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
- Voter turnout reached its highest rates since 1900, with at least 159.8 million Americans casting ballots. More than 100 million of those votes were cast in the early voting period, in large part a response to the difficulties posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. [CNBC / Hannah Miao]
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Republicans are in a good position to retain their Senate majority - Going into Election Day, FiveThirtyEight gave Democrats a 3 in 4 chance of flipping the Senate. But Republicans outperformed the polls by significant margins, holding on to seats in states like Iowa, Montana, and — surprisingly — Maine. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
- Maine is the biggest blow for Democrats, and it was a seat they widely expected to win. But Susan Collins, the Republican who has most often broken ranks with President Trump, was elected to her fifth term, defeating state House Speaker Sara Gideon. [CNBC / Tucker Higgins]
- Democrats picked up a seat in Colorado, where former Gov. John Hickenlooper defeated Cory Gardner, while Republicans flipped a seat in Alabama, with Tommy Tuberville defeating Doug Jones. [CNN / Clare Foran]
- Democrats still have a path to the majority, albeit a narrow one. Gary Peters will have to hold on to his seat in Michigan, and he is in a close race against Republican John James. And in North Carolina, Cal Cunningham will likely have to unseat Sen. Thom Tillis. [AP / David Eggert]
- Neither of Georgia’s two Senate races, including a special election, has been called. Incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler will go into a runoff against Democrat Raphael Warnock, and fellow incumbent Republican David Perdue holds a narrow lead over Democrat Jon Ossoff. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Brian O’Shea]
Rep. Greg Gianforte
(R)
Republicans also performed better than expected in governor’s races. Democrat Roy Cooper held on to his position in North Carolina, but Greg Gianforte’s win in Montana flipped that seat into Republican hands.Democrats held their majority in the House of Representatives, but Republicans cut into it more than they were expected to. Several races are still uncalled, but as of Wednesday afternoon, not a single GOP incumbent had lost. [Politico / Heather Caygle, Sarah Ferris, and Ally Mutnick]
In Delaware, Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender state senator in the country. Other trans candidates won their races as well, nearly doubling the number of trans state lawmakers nationwide. [Vox / Anna North]
Rapper Kanye West, who announced via Twitter this summer that he planned to run for president as an independent, received around 60,000 votes across the 12 states where his name appeared on the ballot. He responded to the news of his defeat with a tweet reading "KANYE 2024." [NYMag / Charu Sinha]
HEATHER COX RICHARDSONTrump's attempt to control politics by controlling the narrative continued early this morning, Trump called a press conference in which he declared victory and claimed that the ongoing counting of legally cast ballots must be stopped. Counting the ballots, he said, was the Democrats’ attempt to “steal the election.”
But Trump’s power is wavering, and he can no longer control the narrative. As he spoke, NBC News and MSNBC cut in to note that he was lying. After he finished, other media outlets also pushed back. On ABC News, Terry Moran said: “This isn’t law, this isn’t politics, this is theater,” Moran said. “And let’s be blunt: it’s the theater of authoritarianism.” Throughout the day, Trump tweeted angrily about the on-going counting of ballots; Twitter hid many of the tweets behind warnings that they were spreading disinformation.
Republican leaders have been surprisingly quick to turn on the president. Last night, the Fox News Channel was the first to call the state of Arizona for Democratic candidate Joe Biden which, according to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, led Trump to call Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox News Channel, to demand a retraction. Murdoch, who has said for months that Trump would lose the election, refused.
Today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters that “claiming you’ve won the election is different from finishing the counting.”
Still, last night Trump’s campaign sent out an estimated 9 million texts to his followers claiming the election had been stolen and asking for money for lawsuits to fight the apparent outcome. Today, Trump and his supporters flooded Twitter and Facebook attacking election results, prompting critics to urge the social media outlets either to take down the posts or to shut down the accounts spreading the disinformation.
The Trump team’s tactic appears to have worked, though. Today, Trump supporters gathered outside the TCF Center in Detroit, a city that is 79% Black, to complain that there aren’t enough Republican poll watchers to oversee the ballot counting, which they think is tilting artificially toward Biden. Tonight, supporters gathered outside Arizona’s Maricopa County Elections Office, where election officials are counting ballots, yelling “count those votes!”
The officials are, indeed, counting the votes. And U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., is following up on the failure of the United States Postal Service to comply with his order to make sure no ballot was left in a USPS plant on Tuesday. Sullivan made the order after civil rights groups learned that 300,000 ballots had been scanned into processing facilities but not out of them. After 5:00 on Tuesday, an attorney for the Justice Department told Sullivan that the USPS had its own system and thus would not comply with the order.
Today, Sullivan brought USPS officials into a hearing to explain their actions. The official in charge of handling ballot processing, Kevin Bray, told Sullivan that the lack of an outgoing scan on the ballots likely meant they had been removed by hand for faster delivery. He could not tell Sullivan how many ballots are still in the system. Sullivan ordered him to provide that data by 9:00 tomorrow morning. The hearing will resume at 11:00.
Trump insisted in his campaign rallies that stories about coronavirus were simply attacks on his candidacy, and on November 4 we would no longer hear about the pandemic. Sadly, today brought us not to silence, but to a new record: the U.S. had more than 100,000 new infections today. At slightly before 7 pm EST tonight, the number was 104,004 cases. Infections are spiking, and public health officials expect the rise will continue unless we address it.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-results-and-news-11-03-20/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/media/tv-networks-trump-speech-election-night/index.html
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2020-11/OIG-21-05-Nov20.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/12/politics/chad-mizelle-department-of-homeland-security/index.html
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/2020-election-live-polls-and-results
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/04/election-results-misinformation/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/social-media-election-aftermath-434120
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/11/04/joe-biden-speaks-votes-being-counted-2020-election-elexnight-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/presidential-election-2020/
