The Daily - An Unfinished Election

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

The U.S. presidential election is a lot closer than the polls indicated. Millions of votes, many in key battleground states, are yet to be counted.Florida — which went for President Trump — is the only bellwether to have confirmed its result. Other crucial states, including Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, are yet to be called.For the moment, it looks like both Mr. Trump and Joe Biden will need to break through in the Midwest and Pennsylvania to clinch victory.The race to control the Senate is also tight, though the Republicans seem to be in a better position.With the picture still foggy, Mr. Biden called for patience as the votes were counted, while Mr. Trump falsely claimed victory and threatened court action.Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent for The New York Times, speaks to us about where things stand with the election and the remaining paths to victory. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: You can follow the election results here.We also have live updates on the progress of the vote.

I'm here to tell you tonight, we believe we're on track to win this election. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. So we'll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. And it ain't over till every vote is counted, every ballot is counted. Joe Biden is calling for patience, and President Trump is threatening legal action, as millions of votes are still uncounted. We don't want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay?

And by the way, it's going to take time to count the votes. We're going to win Pennsylvania. Alex Burns on where the election stands and the remaining paths to victory. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. It's Wednesday, November 4th. As ballot counting continued overnight, Joe Biden expanded his lead in Arizona and took slight leads in two crucial Midwestern states, Wisconsin and Michigan, where mail-in ballots

heavily favored him. In Pennsylvania, Biden has won the counted absentee ballots by an overwhelming margin so far. And the Times reports that if he carries the remaining ballots

by a similar margin, he would win the state. Alex, you have to unmute yourself. Hello. The reflexes are a little slow at this hour. A little bit. Well, good morning, Alex.

It's some kind of morning. Well, it is 1.40 a.m. in the morning, and a lot of people are going to be listening to this in a few hours when they wake up. And despite being prepared by you for the real possibility that we would not have a result on election night and that the race would seem inconclusive, I have to say it feels like we're in an even less certain situation than we had anticipated. Does that feel right to you? It's certainly a less certain situation than I had anticipated, because not only do we not know at this hour who has won the presidential race, but the states that you and I talked about as the early bellwethers to see whether the president's electoral map would hold together, we actually don't have calls in any of them except for Florida

at this point, which went for the president. Very good sign for him. We don't have a call in North Carolina, although the president is slightly ahead. I don't have a call in Georgia, also slightly ahead there, though it looks like the outstanding ballots are pretty heavily in Democratic areas. Don't have a call in Arizona, where Joe Biden is ahead by a small but seemingly meaningful margin, you know, with maybe hours to go in that count. And that's before we even get to the Midwest. So, yeah, this is a blurrier picture than I think certainly I had expected or hoped to have at almost two in the morning. You seem displeased. Well, it's just, you know, you sort of want some kind of, maybe not full clarity. We knew there

was a strong chance that we wouldn't get that. But this is, I think, first of all, a closer election than the polls had indicated. But even once you get below the level of the polls, a closer election than I think we expected the map to give us at this point in the process. Let's drill down into these states that you just mentioned, states that we had expected to be called relatively early in the night, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona. And let's start with Florida. You have long said the scenario in which a Biden victory would be declared on election night would be a scenario in which he won Florida, a state that was always considered very close. As you said, he did not win Florida, the president did.

So what's the story of what happened there in Florida? It's really a pretty extraordinary one that when you look at the counties across the state that we were watching as indicators for where voters in the middle were going, where independent voters were going, Joe Biden did quite well in those places relative to Hillary Clinton four years ago. Places like what?

Places like Hillsborough County, Pinellas County, around the city of Tampa, up around Jacksonville. He did better than Clinton did four years ago. These are traditionally the places that a Democrat needs to make inroads into Republican-leaning areas in order to win statewide. So based on what I just told you, you would think that Joe Biden had probably won the state. Not so, because he really drastically underperformed in Miami-Dade County, which is traditionally the cornerstone of the Democrats' popular vote strategy in Florida. So what happened in Miami-Dade? Well, you wouldn't necessarily have anticipated this based on the way he ran his first campaign

four years ago, but the president appears to have gained ground really significantly with Hispanic and Latino voters. And it's a distinctive community in South Florida. It is heavily shaped by the Cuban-American population, which is historically much more conservative than Hispanic voters nationwide. But the president did even better than you expect a Republican to do with Cuban-American voters and with other Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade. So, Alex, how exactly do you make sense of the way that the Latino and the Cuban American vote broke in this all-important county? What's your sense of what motivated these voters to go with the president in greater numbers? Well, we know that over the last couple of years, the president has made a really concerted effort to improve his standing in South Florida and with Hispanic voters across the state of Florida. And he has done it to a great degree by characterizing the Democrats as these left-wing radicals who are in league with socialists and who would turn the country into, he often doesn't say Cuba, he often says Venezuela.

And there is a significant Venezuelan-American population in South Florida. But there are clearly voters there for whom the rhetoric of socialism that you have heard from some folks in the Democratic Party, not Joe Biden, but from other very prominent Democrats, is a real turnoff. And the president and other Democrats in the state have really used that to their great political advantage. Okay. North Carolina. This was a state that President Trump won in 2016 narrowly. It was expected to be close. As of this moment, it remains very close. What can you tell us about what's going on there in North Carolina?

Well, it is very, very close in North Carolina. And it does seem like there is some potential for Biden to close the gap somewhat. There is trailing by about, I think it's 77,000 votes or so right now. So a little less than a point and a half. Many of the outstanding votes appear to be in Democratic-leaning areas. So that is a state that is likely going to be decided on the razor's edge one way or another. But based on what we've seen so far, it looks like the story in North Carolina and the story in many other places is that, you know, Biden did improve upon Democratic performance in the state, in the cities, and especially in suburban areas,

but that President Trump also improved on his performance in more rural areas. And in a state like North Carolina, you have some big cities. You do not have a dominant big city the way you do in a state like Arizona, Phoenix and the Phoenix area, or even next door in Georgia with the Atlanta metro area being such a force in statewide politics. And so if you are the Republican candidate, you absolutely can make up for setbacks in the suburbs by running up the scoreboard even further in the less populous areas of the state. So as a question of pure math, when it comes to a place like North Carolina, a rising tide of voters, and we know there was historic turnout in this race, in the case of Trump,

that means a lot of small gains in a lot of rural counties that just add up and up and up and eventually become a victory, potentially. That's right. You know, we don't know whether that's going to happen in North Carolina when we have all the votes tabulated. We do know that has happened in a couple other places. And this is sort of echo of the 2016 election, right? When I think there was this sense reinforced by public polling and private polling by both

parties that at the end of the day, there just weren't going to be enough rural voters to make up for the president's or at the time candidate Trump's unpopularity in more densely populated areas. And that obviously turned out not to be the case. Okay, next among this early wave of states is Georgia. And this has been a Republican stronghold. Unexpectedly, it entered battleground status this year. And so if Biden was able to pull off Georgia, that seemed like it would be a very positive sign for him. That's right. And the fact that it is still so close in Georgia is certainly a hopeful sign for Biden that the president is ahead there by about 114,000 votes, with the remaining vote really concentrated in metro Atlanta. This is a state where, unfortunately for you and me, there have been some pretty distinctive snafus at the polls.

A water main break in one crucial facility in Fulton County. Some difficulties processing ballots in one of the key suburban counties around Atlanta. So we are going to be waiting a little while to find out exactly what the tally is in those places, not because actually of any of the sort of structural issues with voting and tabulating ballots in the pandemic, but because of sort of more pedestrian reasons. But what we see there right now is the president certainly holding his own in rural Georgia. Vice President Biden solidly improving on Hillary Clinton's performance in the Atlanta suburbs. And seemingly, you know, he's not carrying these counties, but in this sort of outer ring, ex-urban communities around Atlanta.

He does seem to be holding down the president's margins relative to what he got four years ago. So there's clearly right now a path for Biden in that state, but it is so close. And our colleagues at the Upshot estimate that about 10 percent of the vote is yet to be counted, concentrated, but not exclusively in Democratic areas. And again, the president's lead right now is a little over 100,000 votes in a state where about 4.5 million votes have been cast, 4.6 million votes. Finally, in this list is Arizona.

And this is another state that has long voted Republican in presidential contests, but also has one of the fastest growing populations. And Democrats have, in many ways, been benefiting from the fastest growing populations. And Democrats have in many ways been benefiting from the changing demographics there. Biden appears likely to flip Arizona tonight, right?

So tell us what we saw there today. You know, the situation in Arizona is not all that different from what we've seen in Georgia, except that we have a sort of a clearer picture of the votes from the big metro area in the state, Phoenix and the big cities around Phoenix. That we have Biden leading by a little more than six points in the state as of this moment when we're talking now. He's up by about 150,000 votes. Now, there's still outstanding ballots to count, and those might lean a little bit more towards President Trump. But if you look at these states that have come in relatively quickly and in

a relatively representative fashion, you know, without sort of early votes or Election Day votes drastically overrepresented, this is certainly the most encouraging one for Biden. This is a place where, as you say, the growing and changing population has benefited Democrats up and down the ballot. We saw them win a crucial Senate race there in 2018. And because of Joe Biden's strength, not just with the fastest growing parts of Arizona's population, but also with older voters, there are a lot of retirees in that state, that Biden's improvement on Democrats' traditional margins with voters over 65 clearly opened a path there that Hillary Clinton didn't have four years ago. You could almost think of Arizona as looking a

little bit like Florida, but without Miami-Dade in the picture, that those moderate suburbs that we were talking about outside of Tampa, outside of Jacksonville, there are communities in Arizona that look somewhat like those, except of course they're in the desert instead of on the coast. And Biden has managed to put together what looks right now like a relatively formidable coalition there. We'll be right back. So let's talk about everywhere else. For months, you have been telling us that both Joe Biden and President Trump have multiple paths to victory. Biden just has more of them. Do we find ourselves now in a moment where Joe Biden's paths have also become narrower

and more limited? Yes, we do. I think you'd still rather be Joe Biden than President Trump right now, but you'd rather be Joe Biden two days ago than Joe Biden tonight in terms of just how broad a path he appears to have to the presidency.

Both of these candidates need a breakthrough in the upper Midwest. And that is a pretty familiar place for us to find ourselves in at this point in a narrowly drawn election night. And when you say upper Midwest, you are referring to? Well, starting with Wisconsin and stretching over to, I guess, technically not the upper Midwest, but Pennsylvania, those blue wall states that Hillary Clinton was counting on to winner the presidency four years ago. We just continue to have a really incomplete picture of what's going on there. So, Alex, let's talk about what has to happen in those states for Biden to have a path to victory. Well, if we just stipulate for now that each candidate wins the states where he is currently leading in the South and Southwest, that's President Trump narrowly holding on to North Carolina and Georgia, Joe Biden narrowly holding on to Arizona and Nevada.

Then our attention shifts to the north, to that string of states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. And you now have both candidates within striking distance of 270. And if either of them wins two of those states, the election is over. They have almost certainly at that point won 270 electoral college votes. In that scenario, if the president wins just Pennsylvania or just Michigan, he hits 270. He cannot win just by picking up a Wisconsin and adding it to the map that I just described. So you are in a pretty deadlocked situation until we get clarity in either Pennsylvania or all three of those states that you're looking at a really potentially quite narrow margin in the electoral

college. And the reason why we don't yet have results in those three states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, correct me if I'm wrong, is that they are quite slow to count mail-in ballots, of which there are many in all three. That's right. And in especially the state of Pennsylvania, they're literally not legally allowed to count votes before Election Day, even if those votes have been cast weeks in advance through mail-in voting. So we are getting a pretty fragmentary picture of these states. If you look at them on our map right now, the president is leading in all of them. But that is at least in part because those states are counting election day votes first and Republicans are expected to win the vote on election day. You have millions

of outstanding ballots, especially in Michigan and Pennsylvania, that are expected to lean to Joe Biden. We just don't know exactly how many and we don't know exactly by how much they will lean to him and whether when they are all counted, it will be enough to overcome the lead that the president currently has because of Election Day votes. By the way, Alex, can we talk for a moment about the polling in a place like Wisconsin? I feel like I have to hold somebody accountable for that. The last Time-Siena College poll showed Joe Biden up 11 points in Wisconsin, and we don't know the results yet for Wisconsin, but it's looking very close. It's not looking like anything close to an 11 point spread. So what do you make of that? I know you're not responsible for the contents of all

polls, but what do you think? Well, I appreciate I know you're not responsible for the contents of all polls, but what do you think? Well, I appreciate you saying I'm not responsible for the contents of the polls. I'm not a pollster. But I do have my byline on a lot of stories where we wrote up that polling information. That's what I was getting at. It is really bracing to look at the results we have tonight and see that in many cases, certainly in Wisconsin, as you say, they do not line up with what our polls predicted. That same is true in Florida. We will see about Arizona. That may hold up better there. We will see about Pennsylvania. But yeah, clearly the president had a reservoir of support in Wisconsin that our polls missed. And this is a place where I think it behooves those of us in the media

who have our own public polling to, in some cases, listen to the campaigns. Because the campaigns, they can spin you and they can claim that their numbers are different than they are. But both sides of this race, not just the Trump side, also the Biden side, said pretty insistently that they did not have the kind of blowout leads that were showing up in some of the media polling. And I suspect that an 11-point margin in Wisconsin would fall into that category. At this point, Alex, does President Trump actually have more paths to victory than Joe Biden? It's sort of an unanswerable question. You know, my inclination is to think not because of what we expect to happen in those northern states where there's still just this fog of

uncertainty. And I think that when you look particularly at Wisconsin and Michigan, those states are quite close to Minnesota. And that is a state that Hillary Clinton won four years ago by a tiny, tiny margin. And that Joe Biden is winning more comfortably as we speak. That's a state that Hillary Clinton won four years ago by a tiny, tiny margin. And that Joe Biden is winning more comfortably as we speak. That's a state that the president targeted because he came so close last time and felt, you know, I can get that last point and a half out of Minnesota if I really make a push for it. That didn't happen for him. So if you look at what happened in Minnesota and sort of apply it to other states in the

upper Midwest that are very similar to it, that's a pretty encouraging picture for Joe Biden. But on the other side of this, if you look at a state like Ohio, where the president won by a wide margin four years ago in a more fractured race, he is winning by much the same margin right now in a less fractured race. And that margin will probably come down as the remaining votes, which are in more Democratic areas, come in. But in Ohio, if it's a proxy for parts of Pennsylvania, that also might be encouraging to the president. So I'm kind of talking around your question. I think it's not quite answerable who has more paths right now. I do believe that it is still Biden, but not by as much as we expected it to be. Alex, you had told us that the fate of the

presidency and the Senate are closely intertwined, that it would be likely that the fortunes of Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents for Senate seats would be tied to the fortunes of Joe Biden. So given the uncertain nature of the presidential race, where do things stand in the Senate races? Well, I think it's a disappointing night for Democrats in the Senate races. I think we can be more definitive about that than in the presidential race. And it's not because there is a sort of unanticipated wild divergence between Senate races and the presidential race. And it's not because there is a sort of unanticipated wild divergence between Senate races and the presidential race, but because Joe Biden did not do as well as Democrats needed him to in the red states that had a bunch of the targeted Senate seats on the ballot. These are

places like Iowa, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina. These are states that, with the exception of Iowa, nobody ever thought Biden could carry them. But if he lost them by a modest amount, that there was a sense that maybe Democratic Senate candidates could, you know, make up the last three or four points on their own. We've not seen that happen in those states. So, you know, Senate majority has not been firmly decided for the Republicans. But, you know, I sort of talked around your question about who you'd rather be in the presidential race. And, you know, tentatively, Joe Biden. And on the Senate level, you'd certainly rather be the Republicans right now. Mm-hmm.

So finally, Alex, a couple of hours ago, Joe Biden came out and gave a speech where he sounded quite triumphant and said he believed he was on track to win. And just now, President Trump came out and gave a speech where he sounded very triumphant. had won and said he wanted to ask federal courts to stop vote counting because in his mind the race is over. What are we witnessing here? Well, this is a totally irresponsible act by the president and the claims that he made in his remarks on election night about the state of the race, both at the national level and in specific states, were just totally false. He said he's already won North Carolina and Georgia. Not true. He said that what Democrats are trying to do by continuing to count ballots is disenfranchising his voters. That's not true. What we heard from Joe Biden was, as you say, I think a confident

speech, but not that kind of preemptive attempt to claim victory. And the message was, you've got to count all the votes. And I think that's something that is clearly true. You do have to count all the votes in these states before you call a winner. So, you know, it's a different kind of optimistic spin to put on, I think, a more precarious situation than Biden anticipated at this point. I wouldn't put it on par with what the president did, which was just an act of real drastic irresponsibility. But Alex, what is that intended to accomplish from the president? Well, it's intended to undermine public faith in the electoral process as it was set up to take place this year. And it is intended to make it harder for Joe Biden to claim

victory if that is ultimately what happens, even if that victory is legitimately won. And I think it can't be overstated what a reckless and dangerous thing it is for a sitting president to do to attack the democratic process in this way, to aggressively sow doubt about the legitimacy of votes that were legally cast in an environment where we know there are so many actors, foreign and domestic, that are so eager to stoke divisions in the country and even encourage civil unrest. And the president is not doing anything to discourage that. And the president is not doing anything to discourage that. So, Alex, what are you going to be looking for and at when you wake up in a few hours on Wednesday morning?

And what should people be expecting at this point? Well, it's going to be a little while before I go to sleep because we are expecting more votes out of Wisconsin and Arizona and Nevada, and that could really sharpen the picture that we've got. But look, I think all through Wednesday, we are going to be watching those Midwestern states very closely. We're going to be watching the Atlanta metro area very closely because if Biden edges ahead in Georgia, then a lot of the math we talked about gets a lot easier for him. We just won't know whether that's going to happen until the city of Atlanta and its suburbs have fully reported. And, you know, I'm going to be watching the way the president conducts himself and the way the rest of the Republican Party deals with the fact that he is so brazenly trying to disrupt the peaceful carrying out of the democratic process. Well, we will check back in with you maybe at 5.59. Okay.

Right before we go out. Alex, thank you, as always, and have a good rest of your morning. Thanks a lot. You too. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.