Regardless of what the final Senate results end up being, the DNC needs to have a serious postmortem on WTF happened regarding expectations vs. reality.
Like most everyone, I’m very happy that Biden will squeak out a win but absolutely shocked and appalled at the closeness of the race and how the Democrats managed to f*ck up the best chance they had of taking back full control of Congress.
He was expecting them to repress him and reveal the violence inherent in the system.
…eaker Nancy Pelosi.
No
Meanwhile my vote from our 24th of October election:
Interesting thing to note, in some of these states the Libertarian candidate’s numbers are enough to have stopped the states from tipping to Biden. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, at the moment, Jo Jorgenson got 1+% of the vote, more than the difference between Trump and Biden.
I’d say it’s a big one if Dems only get 49. A highly motivated Republican majority could hamstring Biden in many ways.
Everybody - WATCH THAT VIDEO!!
Seriously - Jonathan Pie’s political analysis is as spot-on here, as it has ever been (and it nearly always is). He makes many good points, not least of which is that there is no ideology left in conservatism and that Dems do not actually stand FOR anything.
And he makes them with style and passion.
She pulled away 63k votes in Va.
I’ve been watching every new Pie for awhile. He’s awesome. Smart and cathartic.
My anxiety still hasn’t lifted and probably won’t fully until Jan 20th - but here’s one more thing to worry about: faithless electors.
I can totally see Trump working to flip some electors. One more reason why we can’t relax on PA (or even GA and NC) until it’s all done and certified.
One more thing I’m confused about…
I’ve been listening to some ‘continuing coverage’ streamed straight from American newsrooms, so I’ve been hearing lots of journalists make more or less educated guesses about which way the numbers in various states will develop as the count continues.
Things like “most of the outstanding votes are from such-and-such county, which has been leaning Democrat in recent elections”, and so on.
But those are just guesses.
The demographics of the various counties are known, and information on past elections also tends to be useful. There is actually a science for doing that.
I’d have expected to hear things like “in state XY, our most current projection has Biden taking 51% of the votes. With 63% of the votes counted so far, we have a three percent margin for error, so this is still too close to call”.
Instead, I’m hearing “In state XY, 63% of the votes have been counted. Of those, 51% are for Trump. There are a few big counties missing that usually voted democrat, so we don’t know yet”.
Don’t major TV stations hire specialists to do that kind of thing properly?
Howdy neighbor!
I am profoundly disgusted by everything right now.
The networks only make calls once they’re confident that their margin-of-error bars either don’t overlap the win/loss line, or do so by only the slimmest of chances. Because total votes cast are also estimated based on past elections and not actual votes cast, I suspect the science can only be so exact, and the numbers change often enough throughout the night that constantly re-crunching them would take longer than just watching things come in.
Some of the networks like CNN are doing some of this but the big X factor has been the much higher turnout this year compared to previous years.
AND the fact that nobody wants to call any of the close races yet and risk being wrong. In normal years things would have already been called by now given the numbers they have in hand.
The misinformation marketed to Spanish speaking people was massive. I don’t know how many ads we got about how Biden was bringing socialism. And then the pro-Trump ads were completely devoid of anything - just had happy Spanish music, pictures of family looking happy, then 30 seconds later ‘I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message’. What message?
But since we’re missing family massively, it does pull on a few heartstrings.
sigh, just finish the count. Do it fairly, do it accurately, and we’ll see what happens. Trying to exclude votes because you think they “belong” to a rival candidate misses the point of democratic elections.
