The Daily - Joe Biden Takes the Lead

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

By the end of election night, the results in six key states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were still to be called.On Wednesday, as mail-in ballots were totaled up, Joe Biden gained ground, taking Michigan and Wisconsin and placing him within striking distance of the Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.The count is still in progress in many places. Mr. Biden is leading by a decent margin in Arizona and slightly in Nevada, while President Trump’s advantage in Georgia and Pennsylvania has been narrowing.As the former vice president formed paths to victory, Mr. Trump continued to raise the specter of litigation and escalated his baseless attacks on the legitimacy of the vote.Guest: Alexander Burns, a national political correspondent, speaks to us about the latest on an unfinished election. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Mr. Biden may be closing in on victory, but the “blue wave” that some hoped would sweep the Democrats to shore never materialized.We have live updates on the progress of the count, and you can follow the election results here.

The actual casting of ballots has ended, but the election is not over. We never stop counting until all eligible votes are counted and added to the final certified and audited results. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. I urge Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. I urge everybody to remain patient. At this point, I ask for patience. Please give some patience to our election officials. So many Americans exhausted by this pandemic, exhausted by these polarized times,

and now Americans across this country are being asked for their patience as every vote is counted. And we knew in this pandemic it could take time. As votes continue to be counted. 116,000 and change absentee ballots that are still outstanding. There's still a million ballots that have yet to be counted. What was left was early vote. How did early vote skew? Very heavily Democratic.

Joe Biden's lead in the Electoral College expands. Biden campaigned tonight very hopeful that if they can hold on to the states where they're currently leading right now, they believe that's their path to the White House. The president's biggest battlegrounds, the courtrooms in the states that will decide the presidential race. And President Trump files a series of lawsuits to try to block his path. The president vowed to go to the Supreme Court to dispute the election count. If it comes to that... We turn once again to Alex Burns

for the latest on an unfinished election. We are still in the thick of a very heated contest. It's Thursday, November 5th. Alex, it felt for a moment tonight that America, all of us, potentially were going to have a full-fledged call of a projected winner of this election, and then nothing? Well, it certainly seemed like if some of the outstanding votes in the most closely divided states were to break for Joe Biden all at once, we would be in a position to say, yeah, this guy's going to be the next president. That didn't quite happen. Doesn't mean it's not going to happen. Just didn't happen all at once

and as uniform a way as it would have taken for us to actually call this thing in the states that are still outstanding. And it's very possible that we will hit that point in the wee hours of the morning or sometime on Thursday. Right, right. These things tend to happen in the magical hours of midnight to 6 a.m., or as we call them on the daily, the nightmare hours. Right, exactly. So let's talk through what happened today on Wednesday, because a lot has happened, Alex, since we last talked to you not that many hours ago. And when we woke up on Wednesday, Biden was ahead in the Electoral College, not by all that much. And there were six battleground states that had yet to be called.

And it still felt legitimately up in the air. And with the caveat that it is 10 p.m. and things could change, let's talk about those states. Right. So you're talking about three states in the north, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia in the southeast, and then out west, Nevada and Arizona. The last time we spoke, none of those states had been called. Just there was too many outstanding votes, particularly in the northern swing states, too many mail-in votes that had not yet been tabulated. And so we ended election night with a significant degree of uncertainty. Wednesday became much more definitive and in most cases more favorable for Joe Biden. is more favorable for Joe Biden. Well, let's start with the states where we ended up getting a firm call on Wednesday.

Let's begin with Wisconsin. So late into the night, early in the morning, Wisconsin looked like a very, very narrow lead for President Trump, but with a ton of mail ballots not yet counted, particularly in the city and county of Milwaukee, which is very heavily Democratic, and a couple other parts of the state that tend to lean a little bit to the Democrats. So we were looking at Wisconsin and saying, you know, the president's ahead by a little bit there, but is that going to stand up for him when the rest of the vote comes in? And the answer is that it didn't,

that Biden went from being down by a couple percentage points to up by just over 20,000 votes out of more than 3 million cast in the state. So that is a very narrow victory margin, but Joe Biden will take it, right? And that state was called for him. That was the first major call of Wednesday for Biden and a real sign that those blue wall states that the president flipped from the Democratic column to the Republican column back in 2016 were not all going to break his way this time. column back in 2016, we're not all going to break his way this time. And how does that result, 20,000 or so vote lead for Biden in Wisconsin? How does that compare to what happened in Wisconsin in 2016? We've been monitoring states like Wisconsin in the

Midwest so closely. It's really quite similar to what happened in 2016, except the razor-thin margin is tipped in the other direction, that the president won Wisconsin by not a very different margin. But this time, you had higher turnout in Milwaukee. You had better support for Joe Biden in the suburbs around Milwaukee. He held down some of his losses in more conservative parts of the state, even just by a little. And then Dane County, which is Madison, very liberal area in Wisconsin, just blew it out in terms of turnout margins for Biden. So the president did quite well in terms of turning out his base in the state. And he got

more votes in Wisconsin this time by a good gap than he got in 2016. But Joe Biden improved more over what the Democrats were able to do last time. And so how does the Trump campaign respond to this call that Biden had won Wisconsin? Well, in a matter of hours, they announced that they are going to seek a recount in the state. And Wisconsin law gives a candidate the right to do that if the margin is within one percentage point. But the catch is that unless it's even tighter than that, then the candidate who asked for the recount has to pay for it. So that is what the Trump campaign says it is going to do. There is not really any precedent for a recount making up a gap of 20,000 plus ballots. And in fact, you had Scott Walker, the former Republican

governor of the state, say on Wednesday, you know, effectively, I'm paraphrasing that this is not the kind of margin that you can overcome with a recount. In the 2016 election, there actually was a recount in Wisconsin that the third party candidate, Jill Stein from the Green Party, sought a recount in that vote. And when all was said and done, it only changed 131 ballots, which was not nearly enough to affect the outcome of a state that the president won four years ago. So the recount request aside, Wisconsin, we can now say is in the Biden column. And Alex, you have told us that Biden had very much needed a win from this cluster of states in that region that Trump had done so well in four years ago. Wisconsin,

Michigan, Pennsylvania. That's right. You know, in a lot of ways, the simplest way for Biden to put together 270 electoral college votes is to win those three states that you just mentioned, to reassemble the blue wall of states that did not vote for a Republican in any presidential election for decades prior to 2016. That if Biden can just tip them back this time, that gets him where he needs to go. Okay, speaking of the blue wall, what happened in neighboring Michigan on Wednesday? So Michigan is really the next domino to fall, and we see a pretty similar dynamic there that going into Wednesday morning, the president had

a lead that was actually wider than his lead in Wisconsin. But again, you had a ton of mail-in votes yet to be counted. And it's worth just stressing that the reason why they were not counted yet was because Republican state legislators refused to change the law in the state to accommodate a period of hours, we saw that vote come in and flip the state to Biden, actually more convincingly than in Wisconsin, that Michigan is not a blowout for Joe Biden, but he ended up with a lead there of about 120,000 votes over President Trump, more than two full percentage points and with an outright majority of the vote in the state. So that's quite a solid performance for him there and a sign that, again, he was managing to tap into these historically Democratic constituencies in this state to get the turnout that he needed in the cities and to win over some of those maybe more moderate suburbs to offset the president's strength in rural areas.

So we get a call in Michigan a little bit later in the day on Wednesday. But you piece those two together and you're starting to get a pretty encouraging picture of those northern swing states for Vice President Biden. Right. When Michigan is called right after Wisconsin, one after the other, it's starting to feel right, like Biden's paths to victory are broadening. Trump's are really starting to narrow. electoral college votes, where he doesn't need a whole lot more to break his way in order to lock up this election. And I think that's when you start to see the president really escalate in his rhetoric, attacking the legitimacy of the vote on baseless grounds. It's when you start to see him ratchet up his litigation threats, that there's a lawsuit filed in Michigan demanding greater access to vote counting sites for election observers. Again, this is just sort of a tactic, it seems, to insinuate that there's something questionable

going on. In one striking scene, you saw a group of pro-Trump protesters converge on a ballot counting site in Detroit. And not an enormous group, but sizable enough to draw notice that you saw some of them trying to get access to the facility, some of them chanting, stop the count, and really a vivid expression of the kind of frustration and anger and even maybe desperation that you are seeing from the president's supporters in places where Biden is doing well, where they didn't expect to see Biden do so well. And something perhaps that flowed from the president's rhetoric. And I think for many

people, especially of a certain generation, and I count you and me among them, that immediately recalled a now famous Republican protest after the 2000 election in Florida outside of a vote counting center where Republican voters believed something nefarious was going on when in fact there wasn't. Right. And I think that one of the key differences, just both politically and substantively, Florida in 2000 was genuinely balanced on a knife's edge. You're talking about a difference of a few hundred votes. Michigan, you're talking about tens and tens of thousands of votes. So once Wisconsin and Michigan both go to Biden, where mathematically does that leave the Electoral College situation? Well, it leaves Joe Biden with 253 electoral college votes. And the biggest prize

available to Biden is just a little bit to the east of Michigan in Pennsylvania, where again, this is a state where the president was way up in the election day vote and where Biden has closed rapidly on him as mail-in ballots from around the state have been tabulated. Early on Wednesday morning, when the president was ahead of Biden by well over 600,000 votes statewide. Right, huge numbers. Huge numbers. In a normal election where people had voted in a pretty uniform way in terms of procedure, you would look at a 600,000 vote lead in Pennsylvania and say, that is probably cooked, that Trump is in great shape in that state. But as the mail-in ballots have been tabulated, they have been going for Biden by just staggering margins. How staggering? 40, 50, 60 points in some parts of the state. And so you

have seen him close the gap really, really quickly. So as we are speaking now, he is down by about 180,000 votes. And that is with a considerable vote left to report in the city of Philadelphia and in Allegheny County, which is where Pittsburgh is located. And those are counties that are expected to go quite strongly for Biden. I feel like in an election when a lot of predictions and polls were quite off, the one prediction that has truly borne out here is the one about mail-in ballots. We were told by people like you that this is exactly what was going to happen in states like Pennsylvania. There was going to be this red mirage,

the appearance of a major Trump lead on election day that would be slowly but surely eroded once the mail-in ballots were counted. And I guess I'm now better understanding the president's unique displeasure with mail-in balloting. this enormous gap between the margins that the president has with Election Day voters in a state like Pennsylvania and the margins that Joe Biden is putting up with people who voted by mail. So as you say, though, this was very foreseeable and foreseen that this is how the vote count would unfold. And so while the same pattern with mail-in balloting is playing out in Pennsylvania the way it did in Wisconsin

and Michigan. We do not, however, have a call of Pennsylvania. That's right. I think we are likely to get a call as soon as Thursday, probably Friday at the latest. But this is such a crucial decision for the people who make these kinds of assessments for news organizations, because if Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania, this election's over. He's the next president. There's just so many Electoral College votes there. It puts them right over the edge. He's at 253 right now without Pennsylvania or the other outstanding states. Pennsylvania has 20 Electoral College votes.

So you do that arithmetic and it gets you to a majority in the Ele outstanding states. Pennsylvania has 20 electoral college votes. So you do that arithmetic and it gets you to a majority in the electoral college. So I do think that's partly why folks are likely to be somewhat cautious about calling Pennsylvania because if you call it for Biden, you are calling the whole election. We'll be right back. Okay, so Alex, tell us about what happened in the non-Pennsylvania battleground states that were still left to be called on Wednesday.

Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. So let's put Arizona and Nevada in a category together because these are both states where Biden is leading by a decent but not overwhelming margin in Arizona by a very small margin in Nevada. by a very small margin in Nevada. And we're just waiting on the remaining votes, which are a combination mostly of mail-in votes and provisional ballots in Nevada, and then some additional in-person voting in Arizona. So these are states where we have

almost the opposite thing happening that we saw up north, where Arizona is a state where Biden jumped out to a big lead. He performed very well in the votes that were tabulated first, and in fact, did so well that on election night, you had Fox News call the state for him. And not that long after, you had the Associated Press call the state for him. And that's a pretty solid expression of confidence on the part of some pretty serious people that Biden will ultimately carry the state for him. And that's a pretty solid expression of confidence on the part of some pretty serious people that Biden will ultimately carry the state. But what we have been watching is the president slowly whittled down Biden's lead there. That was expected to happen. Nobody

who has called the state for Biden has retracted that call. The Times just hasn't quite gotten there yet. And the back of the napkin math is that the president needs to win pretty close to or perhaps a bit more than 60 percent of the remaining vote in order to overtake Biden. Not impossible, but that's a state where you'd rather be Biden than Trump. Nevada is a little bit of a question mark because we don't have quite as good a picture of where the remaining votes are and what they are. The margin there is so thin right now. You're talking about less than 10,000 votes separating the candidates that you can't be fully confident of anything when things are that close.

so important together because if you combine them and they go for Biden, that also ends the election. That he can do roughly the same thing by holding onto his leads in Nevada and Arizona that he would accomplish by taking Pennsylvania. It would actually put him exactly at 270 electoral college votes to win those two Western states. And Alex, finally, what about Georgia? What happened there on Wednesday? Well, this is maybe the most fascinating state on the map right now. As of 10.50 p.m., when we're talking right now, about 95 percent of the estimated votes have been counted in the state. So there's not very far left to go. The president

is up by only seven-tenths of a percentage point, a little more than 30,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast. And based on what we know about where the remaining votes are, they do appear to be in pretty heavily Democratic-leaning areas. So this would be a big one if Biden were to overtake the president. And I spoke to two different people, one Democrat, one Republican, both of them watching that state closely, who said it's going to be within 10,000 votes

one way or the other, and neither of them wanted to bet on which way that was going to be. This would be a big deal. It would be the first time a Democrat won Georgia in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1992. And it does seem like they have succeeded in making Georgia as competitive as it has been in a presidential race since either of us has been a reporter. The question is, and it is changing by the hour, in some cases by the minute,

whether Biden is going to be able to make up those last 30,000 or so votes from a pool of maybe 100,000 votes remaining. So Alex, with all this in mind, all these developments in these six states on Wednesday, lay out as best you can, and with all the necessary caveats, the chances of both candidates at this stage? Well, I think you have to consider Biden a pretty solid favorite if for no other reason than that Pennsylvania does seem like it will end up in his column. The Democrats are just supremely confident in that state. Their confidence could turn out to be misplaced, but if it isn't, this race is over.

So based on that alone, you'd rather be Biden than the president. I don't think there's no chance for President Trump to amount to come back here. It's just that we have now reached the point in the vote counting process where he needs nearly everything to break his way. And Biden needs one or at most two things to break his way. And based on the vote counting that we saw throughout the day on Wednesday, it doesn't seem like we're in an environment where everything is going to break the president's way at the last minute. This calculation that you just articulated, it has to be behind some of the maneuvers from the president, legal, rhetorical, and otherwise.

These lawsuits, these efforts to pause counting or recount. And I'm wondering if any of these tactics have a real shot of doing what they, on paper, are intended to do. You know, I think in order for the president to get anything actually constructive out of these tactics, we would need to wind up with a Florida in 2000-like situation in one or more states where the count isn't just slow, but that the final tally is almost comically narrowly split between the two candidates. You know, right now, the only state that looks like it would have a realistic chance of ending up there would be maybe a Georgia, maybe a Nevada. Neither of those is essential to a Biden victory map. So it's not really clear to me that this all adds up to an actual strategy as much as a whole lot of hand-waving aimed at getting his supporters to see him as a sort of aggrieved victim rather than somebody who pretty soon might have lost an election. But even if these tactics aren't effective in their intended goal to change the outcome of the election or even to slow an outcome in this election that's for Biden,

does feel like it may have a side effect or perhaps an intended effect of undermining a president-elect Joe Biden in the eyes of President Trump's supporters. And I think you don't have to look much further than that protest of his supporters in Detroit as evidence that it's starting to do that. as evidence that it's starting to do that. I think that's totally right. And I think it's a serious concern for sort of the larger social and political fabric of the country that the president, in throwing out all of these complaints, however baseless,

about the way the election is being conducted, is certainly giving people who don't want to accept the results of an election that ends in Joe Biden winning a permission slip, a pretext for doing so. And did we hear on Wednesday from Joe Biden himself? And what did he have to say about all this? We did. I'm not here to declare that we've won.

But I am here to report when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners. He gave remarks that were not the sort of brazen attempt to say this thing is over and I have won that we heard from the president on election night, but that essentially laid out the map and the math as he sees it. And now, after a long night of counting, it's clear that we're winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. And says, you know, we expect that when this is over, we will have won the election. And he did not go after the president by name. We have to stop treating our opponents as enemies.

We are not enemies. But it was pretty clearly a statement intended to push back on the kind of rhetoric that you're hearing right now from the White House. The presidency itself is not a partisan institution. It's the one office in this nation that represents everyone. And it demands a duty of care for all Americans. That is precisely what I will do. Well, Alex, thank you. I believe the next time we talk, perhaps there will be a definitive outcome of this election. But even if there's not, I'll enjoy it.

I'll look forward to it. Talk soon. Thanks. On Wednesday night, demonstrators marched through the streets of several American cities, protesting President Trump's plans to challenge vote counting in battleground states. The protests led to dozens of arrests in Portland, Minneapolis, and New York. Meanwhile, in Phoenix, Arizona, about 150 supporters of President Trump, some carrying guns, protested outside a government building where vote counting was underway, demanding to be let in to observe.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Congressional Democrats reckoned with a disappointing election on Wednesday after experiencing unexpected losses in the House and the failure to regain control of the Senate. Despite predictions that House Democrats would expand their majority, they instead lost at least six seats, including Kendra Horn in Oklahoma

and Donna Shalala in Florida, and failed to defeat a single incumbent House Republican. Democrats blamed a strong performance by President Trump across the country, and on polling, that they said overestimated their strength in various races. And for the first time since the start of the pandemic, the U.S. has recorded more than 100,000 new coronavirus infections on a single day, a sign of just how quickly the second wave of the virus is now spreading. sign of just how quickly the second wave of the virus is now spreading. Infections are surging across the Midwest and the Great Plains.

On Wednesday, both Minnesota and Indiana reported single-day records for infections. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.