Let's not get trapped in the "expectations game"...
Last edited Mon Nov 2, 2020, 01:27 AM - Edit history (1)
I've seen lots of predictions of "blue tsunamis," guesses at electoral vote counts and when the race will be called, and even hour-by-hour scenarios of how the results will come down. While entertaining, these all unwittingly put us into the "expectations game" that Trump is playing: namely, that we should know the winner on Tuesday night.
However, if you look at the prognosticators, that is far from certain. Even though 538 put the odds of a clear-cut Biden victory by Wednesday morning at 60%, that's barely more than half the time, and it specifically says Wednesday morning, not Tuesday night. Dave Wasserman, I believe, has speculated that, even for an eventual Biden win, we may well see Trump with a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin late Tuesday night. And Nate Silver has sketched out a probable scenario where Trump could be up by 16 in Pennsylvania on election night, and still lose the state by about a 5-point margin when all ballots are counted.
I'm sure we'd all love a best-case scenario where Biden captures Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina in short order, and the race is over early. But the fact is that, given that this is an election unlike any in our lifetimes, such a scenario is far less likely than the PA/MI/WI one that we've been expecting from the start. And, even if we capture two of those three states (which may be a reach), delayed results in the upper midwest may well mean that we go to bed late Tuesday night with Trump leading in enough states to guarantee him re-election.
Why does this matter? Because, by setting up such expectations, we're falling into the Trump narrative that "the winner of the election should be known that night. If we reinforce that notion, it will make it all the more easy for any claims of victory on his part to be normalized, with the corresponding notion that, should results trend the other way afterwards, it's "questionable" in a way that would put the weight of public opinion on the side of any possible SCOTUS skullduggery.
As to my prediction about election scenarios, all I'll say is this: I expect Joe Biden to have 270 electoral votes or more when the counting is completed. If it's more clear-cut than that, I'll be delighted, but I think it would serve us well for our narrative to be that we don't expect a definitive answer by Tuesday night, or Wednesday morning; if anything, matters should be pretty clear by Friday. But we need to insist that the winner be determined by all the votes being counted, not by some arbitrary deadline that suits the other side.