The NPR Politics Podcast - Biden Needs Arizona And Any Other State To Win The Presidency

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

If the Associated Press call for Biden in Arizona is correct, Joe Biden needs just one more state to top 270 electoral votes; Donald Trump would need to win all the remaining states. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina continue their counts and remain too close to call.Joe Biden has 264 electoral votes, while Donald Trump has 214. There are 60 votes outstanding.FOLLOW OUR LIVE BLOGThis episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I also cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And the time now is 2.19 p.m. on Tuesday, November 5th. Just kidding. It's Thursday, but some things have not changed. After we taped yesterday, the Associated Press called the state of Michigan for Joe Biden. That means he needs just one more state in his column to win the presidency. Though things in most of the remaining states are quite

close at this time as votes are still being tabulated. That includes Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada. Scott, you are with the Biden campaign in Wilmington, Delaware. How are they feeling right now? What are they saying? They're feeling pretty confident. They felt confident since late Tuesday night that as votes were counted, Biden would emerge as a decisive victor, and that hasn't changed. Asma and I were both on a call with them this morning. At one point, Asma asked the campaign to rank the states in the order of confidence. And they declined to do that.

Another reporter framed it as campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, sounding like a parent, asked who their favorite child is. Like, everybody's great. But Asma and I definitely inferred how they felt in order of confidence. So I'm going to quickly walk through the remaining states, how the Biden campaign sees it and how and how we see it as well based on our reporting, if that works with you. Yeah, that sounds great. So let's start with Pennsylvania. There's about 500,000 votes left to count at this point while we're taping. Trump is up by a little bit more than 100,000. And Biden has been winning the mail-in

ballots, which first of all, are from big counties, which lean predominantly Dem. And second of all, have been breaking for him at a 75 to 80% clip, because we know that there was just this huge partisan split in how people voted. The Biden campaign feels like possibly by the end of the day, maybe tomorrow, whenever the count is completed, they will have a substantial lead in Pennsylvania that kind of looks like they have the lead that they have in Michigan right now. They feel very good about that. Lots of other Democrats I've talked to say the same. Republicans I've talked to kind of begrudgingly accept this thinking as well. After that comes Nevada, right? Yeah. And earlier today, Biden's lead in Nevada widened a little bit, something like 12,000 votes left.

There's tens of thousands of late arriving ballots to be counted. But a lot of independent experts and Democrats think that those more likely than not break Democratic. So another state. Those are the top two states the Biden campaign feels confident in right now. And then there's Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina in that order, right? Yeah. And I'll be much briefer on these. Arizona is very tight. It looks like it's going to keep tightening. The Associated Press, which NPR relies on for election calls, has called Arizona for Biden. A lot of other outlets have not. The Biden camp feels like those will keep tightening, but they feel confident he has the lead there. Georgia, they honestly view as a true jump ball.

There's about 50,000 ballots left to count, and Trump's lead has shrunk to 13,000. They say it could go either way, and it seems like this is going to be a state that either way is decided by the smallest of small margins. Finally, very quickly, North Carolina, the Biden campaign is privately conceding that they don't see there's any way that they surpass President Trump there. They think North Carolina goes Trump. And all that means that as long as Arizona stays in Biden's column, he just needs one more state to win the presidency. So North Carolina, Franco, that's one where the Trump campaign also basically says, yep, we won that one. The others, their confidence is, I don't know, tempered? Yeah, I think that's a fair statement. I mean,

let's just remember Tuesday night where, you know, the campaign, the Republicans were, I mean, frankly, giddy with excitement talking about deja vu of 2016. And they, you know, continue to kind of pull back. That said, I mean, we were both on, you know, a call with campaign officials today and campaign manager Bill Stepien, you know, said very declaratively that Donald Trump is alive and well. You know, they say their data shows that Trump will win Pennsylvania. You mentioned Georgia. They say you mentioned North Carolina. They say they'll win all those. And they also say that their data shows that they will ultimately pull back Arizona into their column by the end of the week. They argue that their own data from the field is more reliable than any data being,

you know, created, conducted, made here in Washington, D.C. And frankly, you know, they are attacking the process, you know, and saying that what is happening in these numbers that are kind of going into Biden's, you know, moving over to Biden are, you know, questionable. And they're actually launched a bunch of legal actions. Yesterday, they said they were going to call for a recount in Wisconsin. They say they're filing suits in Pennsylvania and Michigan. They announced today they're going to file a suit in Nevada over votes that they say were cast improperly. But, you know, and it's a big but, they haven't really provided any evidence of some of the allegations that they've kind of thrown against the wall, including saying that votes were cast by dead people.

Votes were cast by people who had moved out of town. So there's just there's there's a lot of there's a lot of accusations there, but with little evidence and anything concrete so far. I think just to add to this one one moment where audio reporting kind of told a big story. Our sister podcast Up First started off this morning playing chants of Trump supporters in Michigan saying, stop the count, and then Trump supporters in Arizona saying, count the votes. So it's hard to have a unified legal theory when you're down in a lot of states and the situation is different in different places. If the votes were, if they stopped right now, Biden would win. Right. different in different places. If the votes were, if they stopped right now, Biden would win. Right. And yet President Trump has tweeted in all caps, stop the count. And they also put out a statement from the campaign that is supposed to be from the president. It also was in all caps.

It says, if you count the legal votes, I easily win the election, exclamation point. If you count the illegal and late votes, they can steal the election from us, exclamation point. It's possible that they sent this out as a press statement and a press release instead of him tweeting it because Twitter would have blocked it for containing misleading information about an election. Yeah. Twitter's been, you know, blocking or at least flagging several of his tweets, including today. Scott, do you have any sense of what the timeline might be, like when we might get out of purgatory? Sure. The Pennsylvania timeline, it's worth stressing, is what state and county officials said all along. They said that it was probably going to take to Friday to count all these ballots.

There were hundreds of thousands. Well, they started with millions of uncounted mail-in ballots. There's several hundred thousand left, and they didn't start counting them until Tuesday. So the Secretary of State told CNN earlier today that she thinks the vast majority could be counted by the end of the day today. But I would point out a lot of these we could have results by X timelines have not been met. So today or tomorrow feels like Pennsylvania's realistic answer. Georgia, it could be sooner. But there's every indication that whenever we get these final batch of ballots in Georgia, it's going to be tighter than tight than tight. I could

try and do some sort of like Dan Rather-ism, but I won't. So I expect we might not have clarity in Georgia right away just yet. And Nevada is not going to be any minute now either. Yeah, and Nevada is one of many states where they continue to accept mail-in ballots for several days after the election. So there's a lot of vote left to come in and count in Nevada. We said how close Biden was. Donald Trump has 214 electoral votes. He still has a path, even though it's a narrow one, but he would have to win Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada. And the one thing I would just add is after four years of covering the Trump administration, that is to expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to Trump.

There's a path. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, a look at where things stand with Congress. The news moves fast. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast to keep up. We update stories as they evolve every hour. So no matter when you listen, you get the news as close to live as possible on your schedule. Subscribe to or follow the NPR News Now podcast. And we're back. And one thing I wanted to talk about was the House of Representatives where Mara, Republican women have made a lot of gains.

And, and, you know, there was some thought initially that there could be a blue wave and that House Democrats would gain more seats. That clearly has not happened. And Republican women are a big part of the reason. That's right. One of the biggest surprises in this race has been just how wrong everyone was, public polls and the House Democrats internal polls, about their chances to pick up seats. People were predicting that the House Democrats would pick up anywhere from five to 15 seats. Turns out they lost seats. And Republican women, who numbered about 13 in this Congress, that's the same number of Republican women there were in the House in 1989, so they were starting from a very low point, are going to be up in over 20 when we convene in January. So Republican women made big strides, they really had to, they'd lost suburban women badly, and they're trying to climb out of the

hole and they made some progress. Now we have talked about Georgia as relates to the presidential race, but it is also a nail biter on the Senate side, too. There were two Senate seats up. But if the candidates don't get more than 50 percent of the vote, then they go to a runoff in Georgia. We could be headed for runoffs in both of those now. It looks that way now. Senator Perdue has dropped under 50% in Georgia. It's increasingly likely this double runoff in January would be for control of the U.S. Senate.

Democrats really did not perform as well as they thought they would in a lot of key races. They're down. They've only gained, as of right now, one net Senate seat. It looks like I can't even picture to begin how crazy it'll be a double Senate runoff in January for control of the Senate, which will just be wild. It will be so wild. I mean, can you just imagine the amount of money that will be spent on those campaigns? I mean, just how big of a consequence this would be. It's really tremendous.

And what we've seen in terms of huge amounts of money coming in from out of state doesn't necessarily help Democrats win. Yeah, I think there's a pretty clear track record based on results. Money doesn't buy you love or Senate seats. But it will be the difference between the Democrats having a majority and not having a majority.

So it will be the political center of the universe for a number of weeks. And I think this is a good moment to say what we don't know. I'm going back and forth in my head and, you know, I'll just wait and see what the reality actually is. But say Biden does prevail and Joe Biden is the president-elect, I just don't know where the energy is in terms of who shows up in January for a situation like that. Like, like, are Democrats or Republicans more mobilized in that situation if it's for control of the Senate? A big question. We will be doing a lot of Senate control if it is a Biden presidency? If it is a narrowly controlled interesting to see what does he see in his political interest. He's got a ton of Republicans who are going to run for reelection in 2022. But, you know, the thing about the irony here, it's almost like beware of what you wish for or say you wish for. You might get it. You know, Joe Biden campaigned on someone who could work across the aisle, who used to work across the aisle. As Scott just said, a lot of Democrats thought he was hopelessly naive, that those days would never come back again. But I was told by a Biden pollster

that that message really appealed to voters, and they took him at his word, and they returned divided government to Washington. Possibly. Well, at least for now. For now. And as soon as we get out of purgatory, we will find out. Okay. Yeah. Okay. But there will be no overreaching by definition. And the other thing I was told is that Joe Biden is a half a loaf kind of guy. He's really pragmatic. He wants to make a deal. He has deep knowledge of Congress. Obviously, he's been around for a really long time. He's not ideological. He's a centrist. Who knows? Could be total gridlock or maybe we could get something done. Yeah. in the days and weeks ahead. We will, of course, be back in your feeds when there is a call in this presidential race. Remember, you can support all of us on this podcast by supporting your local public radio station

by going to donate.npr.org slash politics. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I also cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm still in Wilmington, and I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I also cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I'm still in Wilmington and I cover the presidential campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.