The Long Road to 270

Minutes before 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, the president took to Twitter to claim victory ...

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Minutes before 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, the president took to Twitter to claim victory in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. The president also said he “hereby [claims]” Michigan “if, in fact,… there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!” The president and his closest allies are also alleging that late-arriving votes are evidence of fraud. What should we make of all this? “This is the president of the United States acting like a Third World dictator,” Steve says on today’s episode. “It’s complete nonsense. It’s made up. The only rhyme or reason to what he’s doing is he wants to count votes that he thinks are his and disqualify votes that he thinks are not.” On today’s show, our podcast hosts dissect this year’s polling catastrophe, where their electoral predictions went sour, and what our country might look like in January 2021.

Show Notes:

-Jonah’s Wednesday G-File: “The Most Chaotic Timeline,” The Sweep: “Your 2020 Election Night Guide,” The Morning Dispatch: “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Angie

    Loved this guys, thanks
    And Jonah and Steve....loved your rants, it was appropriate for this instance

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  2. Avatar photo
    Angie

    Loved this guys, thanks
    And Jonah and Steve....loved your rants, it was appropriate for this instance

    Collapse
  3. Avatar photo
    Angie

    Loved this guys, thanks
    And Jonah and Steve....loved your rants, it was appropriate for this instance

    Collapse
  4. Craig Guthrie

    Not as a comment re "The Long Road to 270."
    Assuming that Biden will be president and assuming that Republicans still control the Senate, hear comments about Biden's history of "working across the aisle;" of his record of bi-partisanship. True? There is a record of Biden have personal friendships with Republicans; most notably John McCain/McCain family. But is there a record that he ever compromised; engaged in successful logrolling; ever horse-traded something he believed in/wanted in order to get something bigger for the country? Perhaps there is a story here.

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  5. Kevin H

    It isn’t a shy Trump voter it is an embarrassed Trump voter.

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  6. Tngraham

    My theory on why the polling was so wrong ...

    I think a big part of it was voters like me who are conservative but don't like Trump and who vacillated between voting for him out of revulsion for the Democratic party and not casting a vote in the presidential race. My feeling varied on a daily basis during the run up to the election, and if a pollster had asked me at any given time there's a reasonable chance I would have said I wasn't voting for Trump. But when push came to shove, my fear and loathing for the new Democrats' critical theory, identity politics, and mommy statism overcame my fear and loathing for Trump.

    My hunch is that maybe 10-15% of the populace is like me, and the aggregation of my dilemma across the populace could easily have accounted for a 7-10% underestimate of eventual Trump votes.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Mark Stobbe

    On the question of post E-day counting, some comparative perspective might be useful.

    I am from the Canadian province (state) of Saskatchewan. It has a population of 1.1 million. We had a provincial election on October 26th. As in the states, there was an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots - about 60,000 of them (I know, it all sounds so quaint). Further, our ballots are simple. We have a parliamentary system, so each voter has only one choice to make. This means counters are only counting one for one position.

    As I said, we voted on October 26. Polls closed at 8:00 p.m. E-day voting was largely counted and released by 10:00 pm. However - there have been two rounds of releasing mail-in ballots. The final tally is not scheduled to be released until November 7. As of this moment, 8 of 61 constituencies (districts) have not been called. Nobody (except a few candidates) are particularly excited. This is partly because the election is less consequential and partly because the overall results are not particularly close. But the most important reason for the laid back attitude is all parties and candidates accept the legitimacy and integrity of the system

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  8. Steve Hamilton

    The assumption seems to be that the polls were wrong. Logic dictates there are 2 possible explanations - 1) the polls were wrong, 2) the vote counting was wrong. I'm not declaring the vote counting was wrong. i'm asking, "how would we know if it was"? I've looked enough to have doubts that we would know. So please either educate me, or broaden your consideration of possible explanations.

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  9. Nathaniel

    Shy conservative here (quite religious, fiscally conservative, Trump skeptical). Several years teaching in academia taught me to keep my mouth shut. I recently left the academy for government service, but things are socially similar here. I had one vivid experience this last year during the impeachment that sums up some of my "shy" feelings. The impeachment came up with a colleague and I made some comment to the effect that if Trump was convicted that Pence would be a definite improvement. His countenance changed and he recoiled, concluding "ooh that would actually be worse" and he stopped talking to me as openly from then on. This made me think "wow these people actually hate people like me more than they dislike Trump".

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    1. Nathaniel

      More on topic, if contacted by a pollster the day I voted, I would have said I was undecided even though I was choosing between a write in and voting for Trump as a protest vote (I live in a very blue state). I think a lot of people want their answers to these questions to be an expression of their identity, and when the parts of their identity that are most important to them don't line up nicely with current politics (e.g. transactional voters), polling becomes unreliable.

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  10. Kara

    Another “shy” Trump voter story. I answered an online poll in August or September that I planned to vote for Biden. I truly believe that it will be better for the country and for conservative ideas for Trump not to be president. However, when Biden started evading court packing questions, and when he looks so frail (and Harris looks so eager) I couldn’t vote for him. I ended up voting Libertarian again, but I was undecided until I walked into the booth. Admitting my political feelings has gotten me branded as racist by friends from college. No one at work would outright call me racist for being a registered Republican, But it would not be good for my career.

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