Some folks are seeing this election as a squeaker for Biden since we saw close races in key states. This has concealed the fact that Biden actually is winning the popular vote by a large margin. Since many votes are still not counted across the country I thought I would do a simple exercise where I projected margins for the votes outstanding in each state.
Much of this is naturally guesswork, but hopefully not too nutty. I applied some simple rules. As we have seen, the vast majority of mail-in ballots are for Biden, even in pro-Trump areas. This means that I assumed in most states that the remaining vote was more pro-Biden than the vote already recorded.
In the pro-Trump states, I assumed there was no margin for the outstanding votes. This would not have made a huge difference since in most of these states 98 percent of the vote was already in, but it seems plausible that Biden would have come close in the votes outstanding in these states. (I used the NYT data from 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, November 7th.) For other states, I assumed more of a pro-Biden tilt. As we saw, in Pennsylvania the mail-in votes went to Biden by a margin of around 50 percentage points. I assumed margins of 40 pp in a number of states (a 70-30 margin) and somewhat smaller margins in other states. In CA I assumed the remaining votes would follow the same pattern as the votes reported to date.
Here’s the story:
I get a bottom line for a final adjusted margin of 8,101,000 votes. If anyone sees an obvious problem with my calculations, I welcome corrections.
(Correction: I had originally had the margin at 9.7 million, but had two errors pointed out to me on Twitter.)
This column originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
Tells the facts, names the names. CounterPunch is an independent US based politics magazine and online publication.
www.counterpunch.org/
Comments
5 responses to “The 8.1 Million Vote Landslide (CounterPunch Nov 11, 2020)”
There is no such race as “the popular vote”.
There are two races that matter.
First, the way the US Presidential Election is run according to the Constitution. It notoriously produces close outcomes and yes this is another “squeaker”.
Second, the way Trump is seeking to have that changed. There have been several changes proposed, from “stop the count” to legal appeals. But there are other strategies running and yet to play out. They include Trump’s stacking of the Supreme Court and his installation of stooges hurriedly into Defence positions.
But nobody, certainly not Trump, is seeking to change the US Presidential to a simple national popular vote. This is a Federation.
Thank you for the gratuitous lecture on the bleeding obvious.
Here in Australia, we are also a federation and have some awareness of the oddities this can lead to through our Senate. However, imperfect as our constitution, systems and institutions may be, we are not burdened with an eighteenth century anti-democratic constitution or a third-world-standard voting system. Equally, imperfect as our education system and media may be, we do not suffer from the American masturbatory obsession with ourselves and our own systems and are generally well aware of the US presidential voting system and its amusing oddities.
But many of us are also able to understand that the author of this article – who is obviously entirely aware of the constitutional realities of the US system and is not in any way arguing to change them – was simply making the rather interesting point that, though the system-driven outcome is far from a landslide (it is nonetheless a solid win, and very similar to the margin Trump himself achieved in 2016) the number of actual, living Americans who voted for Biden is very significantly higher than the number who voted for Trump.
That was the sole point being made and, though it obviously will not affect the legal outcome, it is far from trivial.
My view, Felix, is that the simple national aggregate of the popular vote is trivial. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by millions and lost the Presidential race to Trump. That was not a unique exception.
I would be more interested in an assessment of how few electors decide the 2020 race assuming no change to the rules. For example, Georgia has 16 votes in the Electoral College and chooses to cast them “winner take all”. Yesterday, Georgia committed to a recount. “We are literally looking at a margin of less than a large high school,” added Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting implementation manager. North Carolina, Arizona are very close and Wisconsin and several more are within the margin allowing Trump to demand a recount. This is the real race for President and VP. It is not over, it is close, but I agree Biden is expected to win.
There are many variations in rules, made and proposed, that started decades ago and continue. To spare you a distasteful lecture, try: https://www.270towin.com/alternative-electoral-college-allocation-methods/?year=2016.
The point of my post was to alert readers to the appointments Trump is making. Given his obsession with the Presidential race, it is worth asking whether these appointments are designed to change the outcome. If a shooting war starts in the South China Sea before the Electoral College in mid-December, you will be able to say you thought about it.
Thank you for failing to read my post and merely adding further detail to labour a point that EVERYBODY understands: we all know how the system works and how, indeed, it can produce weird outcomes, such as in Georgia, where relatively few votes can tip the either/or electoral college vote completely one way or another. I full appreciate the oddities of the system, which is why I was so critical of it – and I have little interest in parsing the finer points of its peculiarities.
Though I would note that one of the few aspects of the system that DOES appear to work quite well is the security around voter fraud and the care and accuracy of the count. Therefore it is the calls for recounts that are likely to prove to be trivial in practice, though it is always wise to do a double-check recount with very close results.
And, given the near total absence of anything like evidence for Trump’s various legal challenges, these will prove in the end to be vexatious as well as trivial.
Let me repeat: nobody is suggesting that the rules will change – though they should, and there is considerable grassroots interest in better reflecting the overall popular vote, as this tends to be one of those things that real democracies endeavour to do. To dismiss such a wide margin in the popular vote as trivial merely because a poorly designed system dismisses it is to express contempt for democracy.
If the point of your post was to alert readers to the possibility of Trump pulling seriously weird tricks like picking a fight with China, you could have done so without seeking to diminish the simple and reasonable point of the article.
Frankly, while I wouldn’t put it past Trump to try crazy things on, I have serious doubts that the US military would cooperate. So it’s pretty hard to imagine him being able to do anything that will actually change the outcome of the election, though he will doubtless engage in a fair bit of spite and damage before he departs.
Speaking of stacking the Supreme Court with “originalists” such as Amy Coney Barrett etc. Counterpunch features a very interesting essay on the dishonest conceit(s) of those who promote this common position. – the propaganda hacks associated with the now very influential Federalists come to mind.
The essay by Joseph Natoli is titled Nothing Sacred.