The Daily - A Viewer’s Guide to Election Night

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

There are many permutations of the U.S. presidential election — some messier than others.Joe Biden’s lead in national polls suggests he has a number of paths to victory. If states like Florida or Georgia break for him early on, then the Trump campaign could be in for a long night.The task for President Trump is to close those paths. If he can hold Florida and quickly add the likes of Arizona and North Carolina, then the signs could point to re-election.And then there is a third scenario. If fast-counting states are too close to call immediately and battlegrounds in the Midwest take a long time to tally votes, then a long wait for a final result — and bitter, lengthy legal challenges — could be on the cards.We speak to Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The Times, on the likely plotlines for election night.Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times, walks us through possible election night scenarios. In addition to our regular show on Election Day, The Daily is going LIVE tomorrow afternoon. Spend your Election Day with Michael Barbaro and Carolyn Ryan, deputy managing editor at The Times, as they call our correspondents for the latest on a history-making day.Tune in from 4 - 8 p.m. Eastern, only on nytimes.com/thedaily. Click here for more information. Background reading: The Trump and Biden campaigns are intensifying their efforts in Pennsylvania — an increasingly critical state.How long will counting take? We asked officials about their election results processes and about what share of the vote they expect to be finished by Wednesday. Americans are pushing through challenges like the pandemic and long lines to cast their ballot. The United States is on course to surpass 150 million votes for the first time.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, how to understand the election results as they roll in on Tuesday night. Alex Burns on three potential scenarios. on three potential scenarios. It's Monday, November 2nd. So Alex Burns, it is finally, almost election day. It is the day before the election.

It is Arab election day. And so the first thing I want to do is congratulate you for your endurance, especially when it comes to the daily. I think the term you're looking for is mazel tov. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And a big mazel to you, Michael. And to you as well. The reason we want to talk to you on the eve of this election, as opposed to all the other times we've abused your time, is because everybody is about to be inundated with data,

starting at 7 p.m. tomorrow night. And we want to help people make sense of what those results are going to mean as they come in. And so if we are successful in this conversation, Alex, I think what we will have created is a bit of a user's guide for election night, if that makes sense. It does. Okay. So guide us, if you would. How do you think about the way things will unfold tomorrow night, all the various permutations of it?

things will unfold tomorrow night, all the various permutations of it. Well, the big disclaimer up front is that these are our expectations for how tomorrow night might unfold. We have done a lot of looking at the ballot counting procedures, at what different state authorities say they think they are going to be doing tomorrow night. The campaigns have their own expectations for how this might unfold. But above all of that is just the reality that we've never had an election like this before. So it's possible that we will have these expectations

and they will be totally shattered by what actually happens on election night. It's possible the counting could be much faster, possible it could be much slower. But with that giant asterisk, I think we can anticipate three broad scenarios for how election night will unfold. Okay. What is the first of those broad scenarios? The first scenario would be that Joe Biden scores a significant win in one of the states that we expect to count their votes the fastest,

like Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona. These are states that have well-developed, for the most part, mail-in and early balloting systems, and they have local laws that allow election officials to begin preparing to count or actually count the votes before election day. A state like Florida, in part because of the huge population of seniors, because of the high incidence of natural disasters like hurricanes, has used mail-in voting for years and years and years. So it's a very well-developed and efficient and reliable system of voting, or at least as reliable as a voting system can be in the state of Florida. So we are expecting Florida first and foremost, but then a couple of those other states in the South and Southwest that I mentioned to move pretty quickly. OK, so to continue this scenario, one of these states, North Carolina, for example, or Florida or Georgia,

goes to Biden somewhat early in the evening. Why does that become so meaningful? So if Biden wins one of those states, and especially if he wins Florida, which is the biggest electoral college prize among the traditional swing states, that's a sign that the larger architecture of President Trump's electoral map is really, really flawed. There are not a lot of Republicans who believe that the president can win this race without Florida. And when I say not a lot of them, I mean, I have not spoken to a single one who believes that the president can win the race without Florida. The same is kind of true for Georgia, because that's a state that even a month ago, Republicans did not really think Joe Biden had a good shot at winning it. They thought it was going to be closer than it ever had been before. But at the end of the day, it's a Republican state with red DNA, and it's just not going

to happen. I don't know a lot of Republicans today who are willing to be quite so confident in their chances there. So under this first scenario, where it seems pretty clear pretty early that Joe Biden is going to have a good night or a very good night, we would see that starting to manifest itself in several or all of these states. And I was just to be mathematically very clear, why does President Trump need to win Florida to win re-election?

So if you recall from four years ago, the president won 306 votes in the electoral college. You need 270 to win. Florida has 29. So I wasn't a math major, but if you subtract 29 from 306, wasn't a math major, but if you subtract 29 from 306, you get 277, which means he can, in theory, win reelection without Florida. It just means he has to win everything else on the map. So if he carries Florida, he has a lot more room for error in the upper Midwest, in even the Southwest. If he loses Florida, then whatever the second state is that he loses off his 2016 map, that defeats him. Okay. So in this scenario, the kind of early night for Biden scenario, here is an admittedly risky question. How likely is this scenario under the current conditions of polling by places like The Times and others?

So I think the likelihood that Biden wins one of these states is pretty high. I think that his campaign feels quite confident about Arizona and pretty optimistic about several of the others. I think Democrats in general get very, very nervous about the state of Florida. They just feel like they can run really, really good campaigns there. And it just, you know, Lucy pulls away the football at the end. But I would say overall, the likelihood that one of these states goes to Biden, pretty high. Two states go to Biden, you know, reasonably good shot at that. The Florida scenario is the one that I think is really a sort of a coin toss at this point. I don't think either side can say with any particular confidence that they expect to win Florida early in the night. is really a sort of a coin toss at this point. I don't think either side can say with any particular confidence that they expect to win Florida early in the night.

Okay. So what is the second broad scenario for the viewing public tomorrow night? So we just talked about the scenario where Joe Biden has one or two or more breakthrough wins early in the night in those Republican-leaning states. I think scenario number two is that the president holds on in all of them or in all of them that are called early in the night. That signals to us that it's going to be a relatively close race or a very close race in the electoral college and that we're going to need to wait on the Midwest to find out who actually wins this election. This is not a far-fetched scenario where the president, despite his overall unpopularity, manages to win in places like Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, which are closely divided states, but where Republicans tend to win far more than Democrats. If the

president wins them, it doesn't tell us that he's going to win the election overall, but it tells us that he is still very, very much in the fight. And Alex, why doesn't the president winning a state like Florida pretty early in the night not signal a win for him if it more or less does start to signal a win for Biden if he wins Florida? Why would that be? You know, one of the ways to think about the disparity in this race right now, Joe Biden has this significant national lead. What a significant national lead does for you is it makes you competitive in a lot of different states. And when you are competitive in a lot of different states,

you have a lot of different ways to count to 270. That is the position that Joe Biden finds himself in heading into election day. So what the president needs to do is close off all of those paths to Biden. Biden only needs to find one path that works for him. So if the president takes Florida, that closes off one way for Biden to count to 270. 270. But it doesn't necessarily get the president to 270 unless he has also managed to win at least one of the big states in the Rust Belt or the upper Midwest and push back Biden in a place like North Carolina and Georgia and even Texas. So don't necessarily take that first big call if it goes to the president as a sign that the president is on track to reelection. Take it as a sign that he has a path to reelection.

And that, for President Trump, would be a very, very welcome development in an election where he does seem to be going into the count as a significant underdog. So this second scenario, just so I'm clear, is one in which Trump starts to do reasonably well at the beginning of the night. But that really just means that he's holding Biden off. It does not necessarily mean he's headed for reelection. wide margin, or it turned out that all our polls suggest that Georgia is a very close race and actually President Trump wins it by six or seven points. That, I think, would be a big red blinking warning sign that something has been very wrong in the way we have been measuring this election. But in a world where the president wins those states very narrowly, which currently is what Republicans think is his best case scenario, then no, it doesn't tell us that he is now suddenly on a glide path to reelection. So what would be the sign a little later in the night under this scenario that President Trump

is headed toward reelection, not just keeping Joe Biden at bay? You know, I think the most important state outside the ones we have been talking about already on election night is Wisconsin. Authorities there have said that they do hope to have a full count or a close to full count, not by midnight, but by the wee hours or maybe not so wee hours of the next morning. And so I think watching Wisconsin early results in places like Minnesota will give us real cues as to whether the president is putting up the kind of performance in the Midwest that he did in 2016 or perhaps better than he did in 2016, which he would probably need in order to actually beat Biden in those states. But if there's one state that I'd like to know the result in more than any other, it is probably Pennsylvania. This is the state that the Trump campaign, more than the other Midwestern states, has really been trying to focus on over the last week.

And if he is going to win reelection, it probably looks something like you win Florida, you win those other states in the South, plus Pennsylvania, which is the biggest of the Northern and Mid-Atlantic battlegrounds. which is the biggest of the Northern and Mid-Atlantic battlegrounds. But we don't expect to get complete results from Pennsylvania on election night because of the volume of mail-in voting and because of the restrictions in the state that mean officials cannot start processing those votes until election day. So Alex, is there a version of scenario two where Donald Trump, having a very good night, wins re-election free and clear by, say, midnight? Is that possible? I don't think so. The president would really need to win not just all the states that we're talking about.

And I do mean all of them. Maybe he can afford to lose Arizona. In order to get to 270, he also needs to win at least one, perhaps two of the battleground states up north, a place like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. I don't think it's likely that we are going to get a final call in any of those states by midnight on election day. We'll be right back. Okay, Alex, what is the third scenario for how election night will play out? Well, this is sort of the it's a giant mess and we just don't know anything scenario.

Right. scenario where the states that are counting their votes fastest are way too close to call, and the states that are taking more time to count their votes are just nowhere near complete, even late into the night into the next morning. This is for a political reporter, I think for a candidate, for a campaign manager, I think for a lot of folks at home, sort of the nightmare scenario of just drawn out total or near total uncertainty. This is Florida 2000 in several different states at once, where the count in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, the places we've been talking about that we'll be tabulating relatively quickly, that those states are separated by less than a percentage point. It looks like there are going to be recounts and litigation in those kinds of states. It's a scenario where some of the states outside that group that hope to count quickly simply do not. cities that have a lot riding on them. But, you know, where a Philadelphia or a Milwaukee is really, really slow to report. And so we may have a significant partial picture of an important swing state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, but there will be a giant hole

in what we know about that state. It is not beyond imagination that that could happen in a bunch of different places at once. So in this scenario, mail-in ballots, I'm guessing, become more magnified, more essential, and potentially decisive. And we know there are a few states where those just don't get counted right away. Right. So this is one of the reasons why in a place like Pennsylvania or Michigan, we are expecting to get a count more slowly, that those votes do not get processed until election day or the day before election day. And given the volume of mail-in voting that we are looking at, that is a very significant impediment to getting a full count on election night. We just don't know what

it looks like for a state like Pennsylvania to have to process that volume of mail-in voting because it just doesn't happen when there's not a pandemic. So if we don't have final calls in any of the really big states on election night, then a lot of folks are going to be in wait-and-see mode. Mm-hmm. Alex, you mentioned 2000, this dreaded moment in American electoral history. And in the scenario that you are painting here, that 2000 dreaded reality could play out across multiple states. And since we're in the land of deep dread, what other potentially dreaded things flow from this scenario? You know, I think any situation in which we had a razor thin margin and tremendous uncertainty

about the vote is an invitation to the whole range of actors who want to create disruption and uncertainty and fear in the American system. So we've seen disinformation campaigns in this election. We've seen foreign interference in this election. We have seen civil unrest in this campaign at multiple junctures. So look, I don't want to be a doomsayer here in part because I think that this is not the likeliest situation for us to find ourselves in. But if we did, I think we ought to expect everyone who sort of relishes disruption for its own sake would try to take advantage of that.

So Alex, I think it goes without saying that this is the least desirable outcome for our democracy and for our collective mental health. And I'm hearing you say that it also may be the least likely outcome of the three we have discussed so far. What's the outcome that is the most contingent on a whole bunch of things all breaking down at the same time and in the same way? You know, we've been talking about what states need to break which way in what combinations for Joe Biden or President Trump to be the clear winner or have a clear upper hand early in the night. I think either of those scenarios is likelier than that we simply do not know anything or

simply do not get anywhere close to having a sense of the trajectory of the race by the end of the night. One thing that I think we should anticipate is that the president himself is likely to try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote because he has been doing that all along and that he could even try to claim victory in a scenario where things are very, very narrowly divided and we genuinely do not know what direction the race is trending in. And if that is what happens, I think it's incumbent on all of us to be pretty restrained about how we interpret that. I don't think that this is a 0% scenario where we end up with multiple Florida in 2000 type events going on around the map.

But this is also a moment where, as a political reporter, you got to take a step back and look at the big picture of this race. And right now, based on all the information we have from opinion research, from reporting on the ground, from the data that both campaigns and both parties have access to, this does actually not look like a particularly close election. In that all these polls show Joe Biden with a pretty significant lead nationally and in so many of these battleground states. That's right. And again, we have been down that road before.

Right. I think there's a reason why nobody is taking for granted that Joe Biden is going to come out the winner tomorrow night. For the folks who remember 2016, I do think it's important to distinguish where we are now from where we were then. We have a lot more polling. Joe Biden has a bigger lead than Hillary Clinton did. There is not a significant third party presence in this election. And Biden is seen in far more favorable terms by voters than Hillary Clinton was. So if all of that being the case, President Trump comes out as the winner in this election, it would be because of forces other than the ones that took hold at the very end in 2016, rather than a simple repeat of what happened last time. It would be a different and bigger breakdown in our methods of

gauging public opinion than we saw four years ago. None of that is to say that that cannot happen, but it would be a bigger surprise in some ways if the president won against this backdrop than it was four years ago. Okay, Alex, there is, I believe, a fourth scenario. And I should say, in all candor, that I brought it to you and you said, Michael, I don't know about this one. I don't know that we need to talk about this one because you think it's an outlier. But if you will indulge me here, scenario number four. Well, scenario number four, the Barbaro scenario, is the tie in the Electoral College that our founders, in their infinite wisdom, created a system with an even number of Electoral College votes, which is super useful for deciding a winner in a close race. And if we do wind up in a situation where nobody gets a 270, where each candidate gets 269,

then we're in a real pickle. And this thing goes to the House of Representatives, and the House is called on to choose the next president. And it's not just a vote of the House. So it's not as simple as the Democrats have a majority, so they pick the president. as simple as the Democrats have a majority, so they pick the president. It's a majority of the state delegations in the House. That means the members of the Florida delegation vote, and the majority within the Florida delegation casts one vote for their candidate of choice. So you may be able to detect from my voice what I think of the wisdom of this particular setup. You know, this would be a situation where, you know, some states already have disproportionate power in American elections because of their demographics and the Electoral College. Florida, their 27-member House delegation has as much clout in choosing the next president as the Wyoming House delegation, which is one person. So if that were to happen, I think the conventional wisdom is that Republicans would probably be favored because

going into election day, they do control a majority of House delegations, although that could change on election night depending on what happens down ballot. But, you know, if you want to chart literally the messiest scenario possible, short of a complete disintegration of our voting infrastructure across the country, this remote probability scenario number four is a 269 to 269 electoral college tie that gets thrown to the House of Representatives, which votes by state delegation in a manner that right now favors the president's reelection. That's right. Got it. I do not think this is a likely scenario, obviously. scenario, obviously. It probably involves President Trump winning one electoral college vote in Maine or losing one electoral college vote in Nebraska. Really, really remote stuff. But given everything else that's happened in calendar year 2020, no, I don't think that you're

wrong to raise this as something that people should at least have on their radar as a concept. I feel complete vindication. I just want people to be mentally prepared for all possibilities. Well, consider them prepared. somewhat early portion of the night. And President Trump, rather than claiming victory, as you suggested he might do earlier, just refuses to concede. And so how does that play out? And what are the repercussions? Well, it really depends on how close the election actually is in a world where the president has been defeated by a wide margin, but the president won't say the words, I concede. I don't know how much that practically matters. In a very, very close election, I think the expectation on both sides is that the president would launch a whole wave of lawsuits,

do everything he can to try to challenge the legitimacy of a Biden victory. I don't know that we have any sense sitting here right now of what kind of levers he would really have because it's so dependent on the specifics on the ground. I do think we should at least take in the possibility that Joe Biden might not concede, that in a scenario where the president appears to have won reelection, but by the tiniest possible margin with a whole bunch of uncertainty around mail-in voting in a bunch of different states, I think there will be enormous pressure on Biden from his party not to concede as quickly as Hillary Clinton did four years ago and to wage his own battle in the courts as long as there is a reasonable claim to be made that votes

have not been counted or were discarded when they ought to have been counted. It feels worth repeating at the end of this conversation that the most dreaded outcomes may in some ways be the least likely, just to put people's minds at some level of ease. Yeah. And I have not been on an airplane recently because of the pandemic, but I am not somebody who likes flying. I have a job that in a normal campaign year would require me to fly constantly. And so I think of this a little bit like fear of flying, where you worry about the drastic worst case outcomes because they are so horrifying, and you also know that they are not particularly likely. I think the scary outcomes that we are

talking about are likelier than a plane crash. So I'm sorry to leave people on that dispiriting note, but they are not terribly likely in the context of an election where one candidate appears right now and has appeared for the last few months to have a pretty solid advantage. I had no idea you feared flying. What a weird thing to have and become a campaign reporter. I've made some interesting life choices. Well, Alex, this has in its own, been very comforting to walk through these scenarios. It feels like you have turned a flashlight on in a very dark room, and we appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you.

The final New York Times-Siena College poll of the election, released on Sunday, poll of the election, released on Sunday, found that Joe Biden holds a clear advantage over President Trump across four of the most important swing states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Arizona. Trump won all four states in 2016. Biden appears to be benefiting from the support of voters who did not participate in the 2016 election, but are turning out in large numbers this year. Biden's support is especially pronounced in Wisconsin, where, according to the poll, he leads Trump by 11 points. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Now is the time to take action because there is no alternative.

Britain is shutting down pubs, restaurants, and most retail shops to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus, effectively imposing a national lockdown to avoid what Prime Minister Boris Johnson said could soon be thousands of deaths a day. You must stay at home. You may only leave home for specific reasons, including for education, for work, let's say if you cannot work from home. The restrictions, which will begin on Thursday and last until at least December 2nd, would bring England into line with France, Germany, Belgium and Ireland, all of which have shut down large parts of their countries in recent days amid a major resurgence of the virus. We've got to be humble in the face of nature.

And in this country, alas, as across much of Europe, the virus is spreading even faster than the reasonable worst-case scenario of our scientific advisors. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. In addition to our regular show on Tuesday, we'll be broadcasting live from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern on election night.

You can listen only at nytimes.com slash thedaily. See you tomorrow.