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Where things stand
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Two big myths may be in danger of getting busted after the 2020 election.
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First, that President Trump is invincible, a political Houdini who would exhaust any means necessary to stay in power — and would inevitably succeed. And second, that if he somehow failed, it would spell the end of his creation, Trumpism, the alternate-reality politics and ethno-nationalist populism that have taken over the Republican Party.
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Both of those assumptions may have been wrong.
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Joe Biden has now won 253 electoral votes and has multiple routes to the White House, with five swing states still undecided and uncounted votes in several likely to favor him. While Trump has not indicated that he has any plans to concede, and his campaign insists he could still prevail, at this point a path to victory would most likely run through the courts. It’s a hard road ahead for him.
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At the same time, if Democrats end up declaring a victory over all, it will be a beleaguered one. Not only did Trump outperform their expectations in the battlegrounds, but Democratic candidates for both the House and the Senate also lost races — some in states that split their tickets and favored Biden for president — that the party had been fairly confident about. They included the fight for Susan Collins’s Senate seat in Maine, a House race in Miami-Dade County and another in eastern Iowa.
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In a letter to House Democrats yesterday, Nancy Pelosi acknowledged that it had been “a challenging election.” Which means that for Republicans, almost all of whom ran with their arms wrapped around the president’s politics this year, Trump’s brand is not altogether invalidated. That’s in spite of him looking increasingly likely to lose his re-election bid, a rarity for United States presidents.
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If he moves ahead with legal challenges to the counting of votes, Trump could have one big advantage: Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom he appointed in September and the Senate confirmed last month. She never committed to recusing herself in any election-related cases that might come before the court involving the man who had appointed her.
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Barrett’s presence on the court means that the conservative wing wouldn’t need Chief Justice John Roberts, who has shown more reluctance than others to endorse Republican voting challenges, to form a majority.
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But Biden has an advantage too: The results have been all but settled, as far as some states are concerned. Michigan and Wisconsin officials have released close to 99 percent of the votes to be tallied, and there is little uncertainty about the results. Without the public perception advantage that George W. Bush had in 2000, it becomes far more complicated for Trump to demand something as drastic as overturning an election.
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The president’s remarks in the wee hours of election night, when he brazenly accused election officials across the country of fraud for allowing mail ballots to be counted, became the subject of broad condemnation the next day.
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Biden delivered brief, prepared remarks to reporters, with his running mate, Kamala Harris, at his side as he reiterated that his campaign saw an all-but-certain path to 270 electoral votes.
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“Yesterday once again proved that democracy is the heartbeat of this nation,” Biden said, pointing out that turnout had broken records. “I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished we believe we will be the winner.”
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As Trump and members of his team made false claims that Pennsylvania was being stolen from them as mail ballots were counted, the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, vowed to tally every last vote.
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“Pennsylvania will have a fair election, and that election will be free of outside influences,” Wolf said. “I will vigorously and we all will vigorously defend against any attempt to attack that vote in Pennsylvania.” The state, which was widely seen as a likely linchpin of this election, will continue until Friday to accept mailed ballots that were postmarked by Nov. 3.
Photo of the day
Trump supporters and Republican operatives banged on the glass outside a vote-counting site in Detroit on Wednesday and chanted, “Stop the count.”
In the Senate, Republicans have a good chance of keeping their majority.
Polling didn’t just underestimate Trump’s support — it also misread the support for many Republican Senate candidates, both in and out of Trump’s orbit.
In Maine, Collins has always sought to portray herself as an independent force, and her opponent, Sara Gideon, tried to paint her for the entire campaign as a Trump lap dog. But more than half of the Mainers who voted for Biden identified as moderate or conservative, and three in 10 Biden voters expressed a favorable view of Collins, according to the Maine exit poll. Ultimately, enough split their tickets to hand Collins victory.
In Kentucky and South Carolina, Democratic dreams of upsetting a couple of G.O.P. stalwarts were put to rest unceremoniously, as Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham won thumping victories against Democratic challengers in races that some polls had suggested were quite close — and that drew extravagant sums of money from donors, particularly on the Democratic side.
In Michigan, a Republican challenger, John James, beat the polls by a few points but ultimately came up short in his attempt to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Senator Gary Peters.
Still undecided are two Senate races in Georgia, and one each in North Carolina and Alaska. Any Democratic victories in these states would represent a pickup, but none of the returns so far have been particularly heartening for Democrats. One Georgia Senate race is already heading to a January runoff election, and the other could follow.
If Democrats did manage two more pickups and Biden won the White House, Democrats would regain control of the Senate and hold a majority in both houses of Congress.
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