ICYMI: We did a big-ass explainer on Monday that has all the context you need to keep up with today’s developments. 

The TLDR: Yes, Joe Biden has already chalked up the most votes ever by a US presidential candidate. No, he still hasn’t won the election. The reason: America’s bizarre electoral college thanks to which the candidate with the most votes may once again lose an election for the second time in a row. And yes, the pollsters got it wrong again! Yeah, Trump is planning to sue.

The state of play

The votes: Joe Biden now has a record 70,470,207 votes (50.3%) and counting—compared to Donald Trump’s 67,280,936 votes (48%). Biden has 264 electoral college votes vs Trump’s 214. The winning number: 270. 

Point to note: Biden’s count varies from one source to another depending on whether or not it has called Arizona in his favour. Associated Press and Fox News have turned it blue, but the Washington Post has still not done so.

Overnight, Biden won Michigan and Wisconsin (and maybe Arizona). The key states that remain are the following:

Pennsylvania: Trump has a 190,000-vote lead as of Wednesday night, but that margin is likely to narrow significantly as millions of mail-in ballots yet to be counted are expected to favour Biden. FiveThirtyEight expects him to win this one comfortably. Most Pennsylvania votes should be counted by Friday. Number of electoral college votes: 20.

Georgia: Trump's lead has shrunk to less than 40,000 votes—and will likely require a recount, no matter the outcome. It hopes to get all votes counted by Wednesday. Number of electoral college votes: 16.

North Carolina: The race is extremely tight with Trump leading by 70,000-plus votes. But around 100,000 mail-in ballots may still be out there—making their way through the postal system. The state will not announce the final result until November 12. Number of electoral college votes: 15.

Nevada: Biden is leading here by 8,000-plus votes 😱. It will issue its next update on Thursday. Number of electoral college votes: 6. 

If Biden wins one of the above, he will have the winning total. Trump needs all four.

Trump’s Plan A

The president’s campaign is insisting for “all voting to stop,” and is readying a series of legal challenges.

Georgia: Trump plans to sue over 53 mail-in ballots that a Republican observer claims were illegally counted.

Wisconsin & Nevada: Trump is planning to ask for a recount.

Pennsylvania: His people have intervened in a Supreme Court case that involves mail-in ballots as well:

“In that dispute, Pennsylvania Republicans had sought to block state officials from moving forward with their plan to count all mail ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3 for three days after Election Day. The state’s legal deadline for the receipt of ballots is ordinarily 8 p.m. on Election Day.”

Will this work?

For all of Trump’s bluster, this is harder than he claims.

One: In 2000, the Florida recount changed the verdict because the vote difference between Gore and Bush was in the hundreds. Biden’s lead in some of these states is now in the thousands. As one Republican strategist said, “If the margin is more than 1,000 votes, it’s really uphill. If it’s within 10,000 votes, that’s an almost unscalable mountain.”

Two: Supreme Court appeals take time. As Bloomberg News notes:

“In 2000, it took more than a month before the Supreme Court issued the landmark Bush v/s Gore ruling that ultimately decided that year’s election. The SC has only limited power to sway the outcome of the election. Trump would need to raise specific legal objections—under either the Constitution or a federal statute—that could swing a pivotal state. One long time Republican lawyer said Trump will have difficulty stopping votes that came in on or before Election Day from being counted.”

This does leave the door open for challenging votes that arrive late in Pennsylvania. But again, we don’t know if that will make a difference:

“The universe of votes arriving through Friday is not yet known, nor is the ultimate margin of votes between Biden and Trump in Pennsylvania and whether those late-arriving ballots would sway the results one way or the other.”

The polling debacle

Biden’s comfortable seven point lead in the polls disappeared magically on Election Day—once again shocking pollsters and pundits. Also shocking: The Democrats have not swept the Senate as predicted, and have lost ground in House races. Politico’s hot take: “The polling industry is a wreck, and should be blown up.”

A widely cited cause for this disastrous performance is the so-called shy voter, i.e. the person who plans to vote for Trump but won’t tell a pollster about it. The guy behind this theory is Robert Cahaly whose polls predicted a Trump win in 2016 and again in 2020. The unabashed Republican supporter says: “I just think people are not what they say they are, ever. We cannot eliminate the social desirability bias, we can only minimize it.”

The bottomline: Irrespective of who wins, it is clear that America is a stunningly polarised country—one that even the virus could not unify. And Trump is just a symbol of that deep and seemingly impassable divide.  

And however shy the Trump voter may be, s/he now stands revealed in front of the world. The final word is best summed up by George Packer in The Atlantic:

“We are two countries, and neither of them is going to be conquered or disappear anytime soon. The outcome of the 2016 election was not a historical fluke or result of foreign subversion, but a pretty accurate reflection of the American electorate…

 

Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy… Even as ‘freedom-loving people’ came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well.”

Reading list

• NPR breaks down when we will get the final result from different states. 
• The Guardian has each candidate’s path to victory.
• Legal experts told Reuters why the Supreme Court is unlikely to step in.
• Quartz has a good piece on why the electoral college needs to be reformed.
• Vox decodes the exit polls. 
• This Time op-ed says it's time to stop asking minorities to overperform to compensate for white men.
• The Conversation analyses the failure of pollsters. A related read: The New York Times (via The Telegraph) has a good read on Robert Cahaly and his Trafalgar Group.
• A must read: George Packer’s elegy to America’s democratic values in The Atlantic.