Biden Wins Presidency, Ending Four Tumultuous Years Under Trump
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I really think adding little adjectives like that undermines the respectedness of the NYT
News and media has manufactured consent and outrage since their inception.
They're directly responsible for uncovering heinous crimes and for causing them.
Any choice in publishing one news is simultaneously an active a choice in not publishing another. Furthermore, there is not one singular truth to report in the vast majority of news, in particular of political nature.
The solution is not to find another news outlet that feels more like truth. Instead, find a few different news outlets and understand their biases.
There is no doubt that Trump's presidency was tumultuous and there is no doubt that the race was indeed quite close.
Furthermore tumultuous does not equate to unpopular. Perhaps his supporters enjoy the chaos.
It wasn't all that close. Of six elections (including this one) since 2000, at least 3 and possibly 4 (votes are still being counted) were closer in popular vote, and 3 were closer in electoral vote (based on what has been called so far, regardless of how the uncalled states go.
But it was particularly actively contested, with both high turnout and high passions on both sides, which is exactly what “tumultuous” means.
The fact some previous was closer, doesn't mean this one wasn't close, not sure how we even need to point this out on a site like hackernews.
We didn't wait for days because it was close; races which were much closer were called much sooner.
We waited because calls are made by projections, which are based on statistical extrapolation, which are sensitive to patterns of comparable comparable ballots, and the high mail in count and partisan divide in mail-in ballot usage made projection much more difficult than it normally is.
> Biden has ~50.6%, if that's not close I don't know what is.
A >3 percentage point margin isn't close by standards that make any sense applied to US Presidential elections.
That said, even if it was particularly close, the bigger point is that that wouldn't be evidence that it wasn't tumultuous, since “tumultuous” isn't in any way opposed to “close”. That it also wasn't particularly close is a secondary issue.
As anarchists march in Portland, Miamians are worried about socialism.
Secular policies dominate in California and New York, while religion is invoked by close to every Southern Senator.
Over 70 million people voted for Trump. If you hand-wave away his popularity and call all of them bigoted, then you are part of the partisan problem in our country.
There's something seriously wrong with the far left. I've seen several articles and interviews now where the leftists can't believe that someone can hold a different view than theirs and vote for Trump. It's as if only they hold the absolute truth, and everyone else is the manifestation of evil. It's quite ridiculous.
We haven't seen any protests or destruction by the right after Biden won. Had Trump won, we'd seen wide spread chaos and looting and burning. It's not for nothing that many stores in large cities boarded up.
What they're doing by keeping these lists is not that different from the Nazis keeping lists of Jews. Very ironic.
Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
[flagged] Joe Biden is the president-elect of the U.S. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967
The HN guidelines do say politics should be considered off-topic: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
There's a ton of duplicate (even if separate URLs) submissions.
But again, maybe I'm wrong and it's just me. I never flag and can't downvote so maybe the people that do are correct.
edit- spelling.
I'd say you are wrong, yes. HN isn't supposed to be your source of news, it is supposed to be a source of interesting topics to discuss. Hence "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" (from the guidelines).
This rule is one of the main reasons HN hasn't gone down in flame wars yet - topics like these routinely result in people losing their temper and the rational discourse goes out the window.
edit: looks like the mods decided to save one canonical thread on this subject after all (with a big plea to stay calm at the top): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967
That may be why.
My best understanding is this is not really settled yet. I'm guessing this may be a contributing factor to why some people -- not me -- are flagging these articles.
Articles get flagged by users. Unless someone doing the flagging is willing to speak up, speculation is all we really have and even having some people speak up doesn't mean we know all the reasons why people choose to flag a piece.
I can not help but feel that Trump supporters are brigading these threads and actively trying to bury them. The fact that only old enough accounts can downvote means these are experienced HN contributors. Unsettling, really.
Is this the model of government that the USA bomb other countries for?
Also, the “red team” has been actively helping expand voter access all over the country. The Republican Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican state legislature played a major role in expanding voter access in Georgia the last couple of years (obviously they’re the ones with the actual power to change the election laws): https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/vote...
> Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the increase in registered voters shows the success of automatic voter registration and highlights other ways election officials have improved voting access, such as absentee voting for anyone who requests a mailed ballot and three weeks of early voting.
If it were not for the pandemic I'm convinced the Trump turnout for this election would have produced results rivaling Reagan in 1984. Even with a pandemic he was able to drive more voters to the polls on election day than any point in American history.
This was high tide for conservative votes. [3]
[1] https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/11/04/old...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/20/a-wider-par...
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille...
Florida is likely a lost cause (between conservative minorities and the elderly), but you don’t need Florida to win national elections (clearly). If the electoral college is done away with, it’s also moot, as there is enough popular vote margin at the national level to always go blue.
And with Trump showing that it's possible to increase the Republican vote share among minorities... I'd expect political strategists to focus more effort there in the future. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.
Sorry my thesis wasn't clear, although I appreciate the opportunity to refine the message. Better to get the kinks out here before speaking to an audience IRL.
Losing a solid voter base might mean that the Republicans need to change their platform to appeal to more voters, but it doesn't mean that they're forever doomed and will never win another election. Maybe that means compromising on abortion. Maybe it means immigration reform - but from the Republican perspective, and not giving amnesty to illegal immigrants. (And funnily enough, IIRC amnesty isn't particularly popular among LEGAL immigrants) Maybe it means pulling their heads out of their asses re: climate change, and running on a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
All of this means changes, but not an end to the party.
As you said, neither party is going away, but they will both have to change to accommodate an evolving electorate. As someone said upthread, both parties need to stop taking their voters for granted and go out and listen to them.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/06/28/shifting-pub...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/08/29/u-s-public-c...
[3] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/03/21/retirement-social...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/03/most-contin...
"If Republicans don't challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again," Graham said Sunday on Fox News. "President Trump should not concede. We're down to less — 10,000 votes in Georgia. He's going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more — more votes to be counted."
https://thehill.com/homenews/525063-lindsey-graham-if-trump-...
> While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.
> It’s a similar story with younger Hispanic Americans, a group where Trump has also made gains. According to UCLA Nationscape’s polling, Trump is attracting 35 percent of Hispanic voters under age 45, up from the 22 percent who backed him four years ago in the CCES data.
UCLA polling in battleground states shows that Black voters 30-60 are three times more likely to trust congressional Republicans that Black voters over 60 (21% versus 8%). In the 18-29 group it’s almost four times (29%).
Trump under-performed his 2016 margins in 38 states, including many deep red ones.
Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control.
The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.
My understanding is that Republicans were projected to lose even more seats this election - in the 10-20 range - and instead gained seats. So yeah, surprising.
I'm not entirely sure how Georgia's senate runoffs work.
> The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.
Well, maybe. PA still looks to be within 50k votes, and while it's possible that precanvassing would have allowed the election to be called on Tuesday night, the policy of accepting votes postmarked up to election night even if they arrived late would still leave things potentially up for grabs. And there's a LOT of close states this year. (And to answer "why", I believe it's to prevent vote counts from leaking before people actually go and vote)
The more general point that "If there was a blue wave, we wouldn't be worrying about states with margins of under 50k votes or talking about how control of the senate will be determined later" still stands.
There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:
"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...
49.7% to 49.2% is a HELL of a lot closer than the D+6 projections I saw.
That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.
> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night
It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.
“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.
Trump is historically unpopular among people in the suburbs. Biden won my county by 15-20. It hadn’t voted Democrat before 2016. And Larry Hogan won my county by 38 points in 2018.
I won't comment on whether the US is red or blue or purple.
However, it's quite clear that the Trump administration specifically and the Republican party in general have been engaged in actively suppressing voters in general, and the democratic party's electorate in specific.
We're talking about an administration that, while fully aware that there was a disproportionate and significant amount of pro-Democratic party voters who depended on mail-in ballots to cast their vote, they did their best to:
* sabotage the USPS's ability to process and ship mail up to the election,
* enforce rules refusing to account for all mail-in ballots,
* and prop up their own electorate to vote in person to avoid the risk of their votes being filtered out by their sabotage campaign.
We're talking about a campaign designed to filter out votes to competing candidates, hoping to skew election results in your favor.
This is not how a party that values basic democratic values operates.
What I see is 4 million more votes for Biden than Trump. In any other electoral system this would have been a rout.
The financiers of the right are increasingly open about not wishing for a democracy in the US. The similarity here with the industrialists during the Weimar Republic is by the way striking.
Democracy was stress tested, and it still worked.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/2020-presidential-election-p... (Postal Service data shows poor mail-in ballot delivery rate in key swing states, judge suggests Postmaster General DeJoy might have to testify)
In Washington state where I used to live has had universal mail in ballots for many years and they had ballot drop boxes that were swept on election day. There was extensive information that was put out informing people of the last day they could mail their ballots in.
In PA this is under review by the state and US supreme court: https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/110620zr_g31...
Welcome to a crash course in civics.
Welcome to a crash course in reality.
No, there are allegations of USPS workers coming forward from conspiracy boards. In truth, there were no such USPS workers testifying, or even claiming, any of that. Even FOX News and One America couldn't find any evidence supporting the existence of these supposed USPS workers.
And on another note: military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day since at least WWII. Are you saying that most of the military votes cast in the past 6 decades are fraudulent?
And on a final note: it hasn't been possible to backdate postdates for at least a decade, as the USPS records when mail is received separately and in addition to the postdate, and it isn't possible to backdate that data unless you have access to the USPS database. Considering that the USPS is run by a Trump appointee, it is very unlikely that Democrats have that sort of access.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-D-2GOswwA
Fox News and One America refused to air these videos because they couldn't track down any of these supposed whistleblowers and in fact, Fox News said they couldn't find any proof that these supposed postal workers even exist.
Also, you do know that the USPS Postmaster is a huge Trump Supporter so any allegations of backdating involving the Postmaster would relate to backdating Republican ballots, not Democratic ballots? And in such case, Project Veritas has provided evidence of voter fraud by the current sitting president of the USPS.
Next time, you may want to think before you link.
False on both counts.
Falsifying and modifying evidence: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-woman-approa...
Moreover, military votes have been allowed to arrive after election day in nearly all states since at least WWII.
Requiring signatures yet refusing to reject ballots for mismatched signatures isn't much of a requirement: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/pennsylvania-court-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/signature-...
The point of requiring signatures was never about preventing fraud, since it was never an issue historically. The requirements were issued in the 20th century to reject black votes, as at the time the requirements were passed, many black voters couldn't write.
I’m saying it being non-existent disqualifies claims that signatures on ballot envelopes prevent fraud.
Washington allows ballots to be postmarked the day of the election: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/dates-and-deadlines.aspx
Utah allows ballots to be postmarked the day before the election, so long as they are received before noon of the day of the county canvass (generally, the day after the election but as late as ten days after the election, depending on the county). https://www.vote.org/utah/
(I have participated in election litigation in multiple states. I know more about election law than you do. You will not win this battle.)
The fake allegations of voter fraud and the extensive efforts to suppress votes will damage future elections. And the presidential election survived attacks, but the senate could be impacted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/07/re...
edit- spelling.
No legal process has taken place that has declared Biden the winner.
He's been literally throwing lawsuits around to stop different states from continuing the counting. That to me says OP's words were accurate.
No electors have been selected yet.
Everything else that happens are formalities, however important and necessary. Other than the 2000 election, we haven't waited this long to announce the next president following a presidential election.
And it isn't even close, Biden has more differential votes by percentage than Nixon, Truman, or Reagan.
edit: so i've now been rate limited for posting three things. What the posters beyond assume is not what I meant. I'll not be able to answer for about two days or so. nice
Bait him out with a cheeseburger !
Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss
-The Who
Biden is not President-elect. The President is elected in mid December by the electoral college.
Tens of millions of people are about to get a crash course in civics.
Guess they're also blind to that one aren't they?
This is why they are completely immune to accusations of hypocrisy.
All told by the end of Tuesday he was down in 30+ states (as it is settling now, he's down in 38 states compared to his 2016 margin). He won PA, MI, and WI by less than a point each in 2016. So if Trump was seeing shifts of 3 away from him in Texas, it didn't take a psychic to know he'd be losing those states he won at such a small margin.
If you looked at the numbers in PA on Wednesday morning, what you saw were tons out outstanding ballots in Lehigh, Bucks, Monroe, Philadelphia, and Allegheny counties, all counties that went for Clinton in 2016. You combine that with the fact that Democrats returned mail-in ballots at a rate of 65% compared to 23% for Republicans, and this thing seemed inevitable since about Wednesday morning.
Not a true statement I'm afraid. Look at the number of votes he got. Trumpism isn't going away any time soon.
>Not a true statement I'm afraid. Look at the number of votes he got. Trumpism isn't going away any time soon.
Tumult(n.)[0]:
"1. violent and noisy commotion or disturbance of a crowd or mob; uproar: The tumult reached its height during the premier's speech.
2. a general outbreak, riot, uprising, or other disorder: The tumult moved toward the embassy.
3. highly distressing agitation of mind or feeling; turbulent mental or emotional disturbance: His placid facade failed to conceal the tumult of his mind."
I imagine that many on every side would agree with that statement.
I would assume that most of his bluster about actually winning is aimed more at casting doubt on this in the minds of his followers than any realistic hope of overturning the process.
If you are in a position with experience and financial comfort to serve your country with regards to science and technology, the Biden administration will almost certainly be a great place to land. Look for policy and leadership positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
I'll be submitting my resume and cover letter just as soon as the transition team site opens.
The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.
Instead he puts his son in law in charge of the Coronavirus response, so we are all left to wonder how it could have been if the experts were in charge. Maybe it would be different, maybe it's a no win situation like you said. But at least then we would know there was nothing more to do. No one would be wondering "Maybe things would have been different if Jared Kushner were put in charge of this..."
We all see the pandemic and how it affects our lives. When Trump tells us that it's no big deal, that it's a media hoax that will go away with the election, that doesn't make him look good. That's a choice he's making to do that. It didn't have to be this way.
e: I will concede that it is not "quite distant", though it may not end up close in the EC when it's all said and done either.
> Biden is likely to wind up with one of the higher percentages of votes as a share of the U.S. population that we’ve seen in a long time
Referencing this tweet, text copied below as well https://twitter.com/jtlevy/status/1324408585590329345
[credit: Jacob T. Levy]
vote share * turnout
Reagan 1984: 53.3*58.8= 31.3%
W Bush 2004: 50.7*56.7=28.7%
Obama 2008: 52.9*58.2=30.8%
Biden 2020, estimated: 51*66 = 33.7%
counted so far: 50.5*60.3=30.4% (as of 2020-11-05)California, for example, has only counted 77% of their votes. New York has counted 84%. Illinois has counted 89%.
I just caught the end of some discussion of this on NPR. Based on the number of votes left to count in the various states and how they are expected to turn out, there is a good chance it will end up at around 8 million.
Also, it probably makes more sense to look at it out of the number of voters, or the number of people who could have voted, rather than out of the whole population.