Joe Biden Elected President
Final electoral college tally seems like it’s going to be 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump. The popular vote is roughly 78,000,000 for Biden to 72,000,000 for Trump.
A few thoughts:
We need to have a conversation about the modern utility of the electoral college, but we’ll save that for another day.
Historian Alan Litchman’s “Thirteen Keys” framework for predicting presidential elections held up, yet again.
For what it’s worth, my gut feeling about this election also proved to be correct. I’ve said for over a year now that the political climate leading up to this election did not feel the same as the political climate that preceded the 2016 election, and clearly that was the case. Not to brag, but my electoral college prediction map was entirely correct except for one state, which happened to be the state I’m from, funny enough.
To those worried about election fraud: the possibility that our elections have been manipulated is certainly something worth being concerned about. However, it would be damaging to our democracy in the long run to undermine the credibility of a legitimate election by crying “fraud” where none exists simply because you aren’t pleased with the outcome. Of the dozen court cases the Trump campaign has brought in an attempt to overrule the results of the election, he’s 0 for 12. They have been laughed out of court by liberal and conservative judges after admitting that they had no grounds to allege fraud.
The responses from world leaders and international news outlets has been very positive, as if they’re eager to welcome us back to our seat at the international table and will continue to respect us as the world’s premier superpower. It seems like the world is willing to forgive the United States for the damage and offense Trump caused them; let’s not put ourselves in a position to need to ask their forgiveness again. My favorite international headline: ”America. Great Again.”
We can’t take our eyes off the ball yet: control of the Senate still hasn’t been decided, and there’s a good chance that Mitch McConnell could maintain his majority. If that were to happen, we would experience a two year long lame duck period where none of Joe Biden’s plans could come to fruition because Mitch McConnell would strike them down in the Senate. It isn’t over yet, though. There are still two runoff elections that have to take place in Georgia on January 5th before we’ll know if the Republicans will maintain their majority. Runoff elections occur when neither candidate in a race got more than 50% of the total votes; Georgia had two senate elections going on this cycle, and both of them are headed to runoff elections. One is between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Kelly Loeffler, and the other is between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue. Democrats must win both of these elections to break Mitch McConnell’s stranglehold. Click here to get email updates about ways you can volunteer remotely to help turn out voters in Georgia, or click here to donate to Stacey Abrams’s organization Fair Fight, which helps register voters and fight back against racist voter suppression in Georgia.