Today, Explained - President Biden?

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains the latest election math, and Ezra Klein argues that, despite record-setting turnout, it wasn’t a great night for American democracy. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. 2020, 2020. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos for them. Election day was yesterday and a lot of what we thought might happen, happened. A lot of people voted. The highest voter turnout in a century and it comes down to two choices, Donald Trump

or Joe Biden. Results are taking a while. We don't know exactly when we might know the result. This is an unprecedented election. President Trump looks strong early on and looks a little weaker now. You may have gone to bed thinking this election was headed one way, and then you woke up and you saw things were different and maybe trending, trending increasingly in another direction. We're going to talk about the remaining election math

and what the results mean for America on the show today. And we're going to start with Andrew Prokop and end with Ezra Klein. Andrew, we're talking at about two in the afternoon, the day after the big day. What do we know? So the election is still too close to call. There are several key swing states where no winner has yet been called and counting of ballots is continuing in several states. Right now, it does appear that among the remaining states, Joe Biden appears to have the better chance of victory. But it's important to note that Trump can still win. He does have a path to victory. We just have to wait for

more votes to be counted to get a better idea of which way this thing will go. And of course, we spoke to you about the path to victory for both Trump and Biden on Monday's show. And you mentioned that there were these six pivotal states, three are, you know, southward and three are sort of northward. Let's start with the south. What happened with Biden and Trump there? Florida was called for Donald Trump pretty early in the night. They count their votes quickly. Sorry to interrupt. NBC News is projecting Donald Trump will be the ultimate winner in Florida and it's 29 electoral votes. Trump had actually improved his performance a bit since 2016, particularly in

Miami-Dade County, a heavily Latino county in Florida. But Florida was a must-win state for Trump. He really had to win it. So then we move on to North Carolina. Experts say it is a must-win state for President Trump. North Carolina was still too close to call as of this taping. Trump appears to have the edge there. He's up by about two percentage points, but there is a lot of vote in heavily Democratic areas that remains to be counted. So the elections calling operations are still being a little cautious with regards to North Carolina. And the one southern state remaining in the six you mentioned on Monday's show is Arizona. What's the story there?

So Biden is ahead by a few percentage points in Arizona. And some election calling operations actually did call it for Biden on election night, most notably Fox News, which the Trump campaign was very angry about. I'm sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven point lead that the former vice president has. The Associated Press did as well. Other teams have been more cautious, including Decision Desk, which Vox relies on for its own calls. But Arizona is an important state because if Biden wins it, Trump's path to victory

really does get pretty dicey. And I imagine that leads us to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Exactly. Those are the three states that decided the election for Donald Trump in 2016. And those are the three states that could decide the election for Joe Biden in 2020. Wisconsin is the furthest along in its count. Its state officials said they're actually done with the count. Biden is ahead by 0.7 percentage points. And how many votes is that? So it's a 20,000 vote or so difference in Biden's favor.

That is within the threshold necessary for a recount if Trump requests one, which he is requesting. It's generally considered to be unlikely that a margin like that could be overturned in a recount. Usually what we see is it has to be a lot closer than that for a recount to change the outcome. So Wisconsin is looking pretty good for Biden right now. We should note that all three of these states, officials were not permitted to begin processing the hundreds of thousands of mail ballots that have been piling up until Election Day or beforehand in Michigan's case. So what happened is that on election night, Trump appeared to be ahead in all three of these states. Joe Biden is ahead marginally in the count in Wisconsin. But again, razor close.

Some places still with outstanding ballots. And has seen those leads gradually dwindle. And the big question again is, we think most of these are male and early votes. And if they are, they could favor Joe Biden. In Wisconsin and now also in Michigan, Biden has taken a small lead. But then the big question is Pennsylvania. They have been the slowest to count of this famous trio. And we just don't have a fantastic read on what is going on there right now. There have been estimates that the remaining vote to be counted is very, very good for Joe Biden, which he would need because he's currently trailing in the count.

And if that holds true, then Biden would win Pennsylvania. But if Biden falls short in Pennsylvania, then things get really interesting. Then Arizona could decide the outcome. Nebraska's second congressional district, which Biden won, could provide the one electoral vote necessary for Biden to win and avoid a tie, a 269-269 tie. OK, that covers the core six that we talked about on Monday's show. But there are still a few outstanding and interesting races in play here, right? Yeah. So the other two swing states that have not yet been called are Georgia and Nevada. Georgia, that's pretty much a must win state for Trump at this point. Trump is ahead there by a little bit. But again, we're waiting

on heavily Democratic areas to report more votes. If Biden wins that, that's another potential path to 270 for him, whereas Trump pretty much has to win it to keep his options alive. Then you have Nevada. Nevada only has six electoral votes, and it's generally been considered a safe Biden state. And the betting from most is that it will stay in Biden's hands. But his margin there is pretty small. One of the stories of election night has been that Biden underperformed with Latinos to a certain extent. So that could be an issue for him in Nevada. OK, so things look good for Biden, but there's still the potential for a Trump win here. The Biden campaign is saying things look good for them. I'm here to tell you tonight,

we believe we're on track to win this election. But Trump just straight up declared victory last night. We will win this. And as far as I'm concerned, we already have won it. So I just want to thank you. How is this going to shake out in the coming days and weeks? Well, it's a little too early to tell. In Wisconsin, Trump has asked for a recount. Interestingly, we saw a tweet from former Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who seemed to be throwing a bit of cold water on Trump's expectations that a recount could change his margin. He emphasized that 20,000 votes is a

big number to have to change in the recount. So that could be a signal that if Trump makes some really exaggerated claims that the election is being stolen from him, that perhaps Republicans won't go along. We've also seen Republicans are favored to keep control of the Senate right now. So Mitch McConnell might not want to rock that boat by doing anything to help out Trump. But, you know, it's really just going to come down to how close things are in how many states. If the election really does come down to a very small number of votes in Pennsylvania, we are going to see lawsuits flying, all sorts of wild efforts to gain the upper hand

from both campaigns. But if either candidate wins enough of the remaining states to have some wiggle room, so to speak, that could help avoid this really contested outcome. For instance, think back to 2016. Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by just less than one percentage point each. But he won all three of them. Which is to say he won them by the same more or less percentage that he's now disputing Biden won Wisconsin by. Yes. But the issue here is that it did not come down to one state because Trump only needed one of those three states to win the election.

So, for instance, Michigan was very close in 2016. But Trump didn't need Michigan because he already had won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Obviously, the Trump campaign is going to fight this. They'll try to come up with something, but it's just unclear what that would be at this point and whether it could stand up in the courts. Okay, but just so people know what to look out for, what are the paths to victory now for Biden and for Trump? There's one you know very well for Biden. It's Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. That's all he needs. If Biden loses Pennsylvania, he can get there with Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona and Nevada. He could also substitute

Georgia for Arizona. And for Trump, he's really got to hold on to North Carolina, which hasn't been called yet. In most scenarios, he has to win Georgia also. On top of that, he needs to pry away Pennsylvania from Biden, and he probably needs to win either Arizona or Nevada. and Wisconsin for Vice President Joe Biden. And the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in Michigan to halt the vote count, saying it was denied access to observing the opening of ballots. Might be a similar situation in Pennsylvania. The president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has said he's on his way to Philadelphia with his legal team.

Massive cheating. Okay, Rudy. Loved you in Borat. More in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Ezra Klein, we don't have a clear winner yet. The results are looking promising for Joe Biden. Trump still has a chance, but what can we glean thus far from how the country voted in this

election? Not enough. I would say that we are currently in an epistemic fog. We don't know how the country has voted. We don't know why the country voted the way it voted. The data we do have is not good data. And so I want to be very humble about what I do and don't say. If I were guessing, predicting based on where we are now, I think Joe Biden is well favored to win the White House, but it's not a sure thing. I would say Republicans are well favored to keep the Senate, but it is not a sure thing, though I think it is more sure than Biden in the White House. I would say that we know for certain that Republicans are going to keep their 6-3 on the Supreme Court and that they have managed to do very well in state legislatures.

And this is very important in my view, giving them control over redistricting in the coming decade. And it looks like Republicans will pick up a few seats in the House, so Pelosi will keep the gavel there. So I think the likeliest outcome here is we are headed for an era of divided government at the federal level, Democrats at the White House, the House, Republicans in the Senate, in the Supreme Court, and then Republican control over the gerrymandering process, which is going to make democracy even harder to entrench in this country in the coming decade. Which is to say, if we are about to see a Biden presidency, it might look something like a second-term Obama presidency where you have ideas coming from the top and then struggling to be passed by a Republican-controlled Senate, something Biden might be kind of used to.

I think that's right. I don't want to overrun the analogy just because we're in a different era and coronavirus. But if I had to bet, I would say that's pretty much correct. You're not going to see with these numbers an FDR-style, hyper-ambitious legislative presidency. You're not going to get rid of the filibuster. You're not going to change the composition of the Supreme Court. Something I've been arguing on my show and in my pieces recently is that the central fight in this election is about democracy. Are we going to become something closer to a democracy where an emergent multi-ethnic younger majority is able to translate its numbers into power? Or are we going to keep entrenching this path to minoritarian rule? And the way I would gloss this election right now, and again, this could change and it could change for the better or for the worse. But right now, I would say Democrats won the presidency and lost democracy. Wow. And I think a lot of people seem to be surprised about this. Was there something

about the polling, which we didn't spend a ton of time talking about on our show, but we certainly talked to our colleague Andrew Prokop about on Monday, that misled people, that gave people a false sense of a landslide or a really dominant Biden victory? There are a couple things here. And by the way, I want to commend the show. I think it's good not to spend too much time talking about the polling because the polling before the election always gives a sense of certainty we don't really have. The polling had Biden, if I'm remembering the averages right, something like eight to nine points up in the national and then something like five points up in tipping point states like Pennsylvania. Nationally, the miss is going to be, given what it looks like right now, probably a two to three point miss in Donald Trump's direction. So it looks like Biden will probably have a four to five point popular vote lead. That's really

quite big, by the way. So nationally, the polling is within a reasonable error range. In some of these key states, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, the polling miss is huge. I don't want to hazard a guess exactly on how big, but quite big. I mean, big enough that it was functionally useless. And so, yeah, so on the one hand, that gave people a false sense of security. On the left in particular, I should note too, by the way, the polling was incredibly off in a bunch of the Senate races. So if you look at the Jamie Harris and Lindsey Graham race in South Carolina, if you look at Collins and Gideon in Maine,

I mean, in some of these cases, what you had is polling that was tightening towards the end or not getting pulled that much towards the end, like in Maine. But still, the polling in some of these races created an impression of very close, winnable seats for the Democrats. And that really, in a couple of key spots, did not manifest. And when you talk about those races in particular, I mean, you can't look past the fact that tens upon tens upon tens of millions of dollars of record setting money was dumped into these races to unseat people like Lindsey Graham or or Mitch McConnell. And just none of that really worked out. Was that just a total misallocation of resources and of effort? Could that money have gone to other races or to other causes even? Yes, that was a total misallocation of resources and effort. Certainly in the case of South Carolina, where the amount Harrison raised was

eye-popping. It was just crazy, crazy numbers because liberals hate Lindsey Graham. And at a certain point, you reach very much a point of diminishing returns. It is a common thing going back many, many years now where you'll see these huge spending candidates. Look at, say, Meg Whitman a couple of years back in California, just flame out. Jeb Bush in the 2016 Republican primary. And so it always is the case that in every election, people donate emotionally, they donate viscerally, they donate ideologically. They don't donate efficiently, right? They are often putting their money towards a couple of key races that are really moving them. Like you saw this with the Beto O'Rourke Ted Cruz race in

2018. And so then sometimes those races end up close and maybe that money was well spent. Sometimes they end up really far and it's pretty clear that it wasn't. You know, the Collins-Gideon race in Maine probably was worth spending on. That was a genuinely close race that you can really imagine a well-funded candidate making a difference. But it is always the case that some of the big-name Senate campaigns end up overfunded compared to state legislature races, which are really important, compared to a bunch of no-name house races that are really important. But it's not the case that if people weren't spending on these races, they would have given the money in a more efficient direction or to another cause, right? I think you have to understand some of that spending as an expression of identity and

commitment and frustration, or even hope, put more to the point. It's not being spent in a, like people have their like donate to politics budget and they're just making an allocation mistake. What they wanted to do is buy a little piece of beating Lindsey Graham. And it's a little bit like gambling in that way. And, you know, so I don't want to criticize anybody for doing that. It's better than actual gambling. It's sure. It's worth noting that of course, all this money was raised in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of an economy that is flagging for a ton of Americans right now. Did those issues make a significant

difference here? Or was it like, if you felt that the president was mishandling corona, you voted for Biden. And if you were concerned about the economy, you voted for Trump. Yeah. So I never know how to read that. What I would say is that you're always at risk with those numbers of reading the rationalizations and not the motivations. So Joe Biden centered coronavirus in his campaign. And as such, when you ask a liberal why he voted for Joe Biden, the thing Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in general ran on coronavirus is going to be topmost in their mind. Donald Trump, to the extent he centered anything, tended to center the economy, and in particular the economy versus coronavirus, right?

He was very clear that, like, we can't be an endless lockdown. We need to get the economy moving. So when people vote for Donald Trump, they, and you ask what's most important, the thing he's been telling them is most important is what they say. And so there is a way here in which it is not clear to me these polling questions always tell you what you need to know. And also, I'm in general a little bit mistrustful of the polling right now. And so I will say that I am surprised in the big picture way that the coronavirus and the poverty of America's response to it, the incompetence of America's response to it, the number of dead Americans,

the absolute devastation of the economy didn't move the race more. You know, if you look at approval rating numbers, which are a form of polling I trust quite a bit more than I trust sort of like Wisconsin state election polling, you can really see that Donald Trump's approval rating was unchanged from a year ago. And if you look at the way this election is going to play out, sort of whoever wins, it will be the case that Biden gains a couple million votes on where Clinton was and a couple even potentially points on where Clinton was.

But it isn't a sea change. I keep thinking in my head, like the phrase, like everything happened and nothing mattered. And I don't want to say nothing mattered in truth, right? 200,000 people died. It all mattered, right? The world is warming. But what I mean by that is that this was the most tumultuous political era I can remember. Everything happened, right? I mean, an impeachment happened, a pandemic happened, a massive recession happened. And what are we going to get? We're going to get an election in 2020 that looks a lot like the election in 2016. Yeah. I mean, what does that say about Joe Biden? Was he perhaps

not the right candidate to run against Donald Trump? It's hard. We don't know the counterfactual here. It is possible that another candidate would have done better. It is possible another candidate would have done worse. So on the one hand, Biden seems to have lost ground among Hispanics, particularly in Florida and Texas. On the other hand, he has gained among whites, which maybe is why, assuming he does win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, will likely be the reasons why. That's an electorally efficient trade in a way. So it is genuinely hard to know. You can't rerun the election. Bernie Sanders performed a bit better among Hispanics during the primary, a bit worse among white voters. If you're looking at Florida, which is where this seems to have been the most consequential, that's a pretty heavy Cuban population. They are pretty against socialism in general. So it's not clear that he would have done well there. He might have done quite a bit worse. We just truly don't know. There's a real tendency after an election, particularly if you feel a sense of disappointment in it, to say, we did this, it didn't turn out the way I wanted

it to, therefore we should have done that. But that could have turned out worse or could have turned out better. You know, unlike in the forecast models, we actually can't rerun the election a thousand times with different candidates and see who and see how they all would have performed. Well, one thing I think we do know for certain, and, you know, whether you support Donald Trump or whether you support Joe Biden, what we saw yesterday and for the past, you know, weeks of voting is historic turnout during a global pandemic, during a tanking economy, while the president was trying to discredit the election. You know, that feels sort of remarkable. A lot of people were scared that, you know, there was going to be absolute

chaos in the streets, potentially civil war, gun sales were going up. And I don't want to speak too soon because there still is almost certainly, you know, legal challenges ahead. But it feels like American democracy had at least a decent election day. And maybe the bar is really low, but is that a hopeful sign? I don't think American democracy had a decent election day, exactly. I recognize what you're saying. So we have not, at least at this point, collapsed into political violence across the country. We do have the president of the United States trying to declare victory overnight and sending out five tweets, at least as of the time I'm talking, that have been identified as election misinformation by Twitter and suggesting that what's coming is an

effort to cheat and steal the election from him. So number one, we're already at a pretty low level. That's not a good night for democracy. That's a bad night for peaceful transitions of power, even if it doesn't go anywhere. And then we have an election where if we were just talking about the popular vote and who won it, we'd be having no conversation over who will win the White House. Joe Biden is going to stomp Donald Trump in the popular vote. The estimates I've seen are something like a five to seven million vote lead. Now, it's probably going to be enough to win the Electoral College too. But the fact that there's even some chance it would not be is astonishing. The fact that there

would be some chance that three out of six elections since 2000, presidential elections, would be won by the loser of the popular vote is just astonishing. Again, I don't think that's going to be the outcome here, but that would not be great. Then in the Senate, Republicans, again, I think they're likely to keep it at a very narrow margin. They're not going to win more votes. They'll win far fewer votes. And then I mentioned earlier gerrymandering. In the long term about where our democracy is going and whether or not it is going to be anything that deserves the terminology of democracy, which I think, at least in its folk understanding, which strikes me as correct for this, tends to reflect like the popular, tends to be a system in which the popular will expresses itself through voting

into power. I don't think it's a good night and I don't think it's looking towards a good future. So I'm a little bit more pessimistic on that dimension of this than I think you are. Yeah, I guess when I see, you know, highest voter turnout in a century and consider that it happened during a pandemic that's taken 200,000 American lives, I just feel, quite frankly, happy to see people out there voting, people caring, no matter who they voted for. Yes, the level of turnout is remarkable. And I think if you're looking for bright spots,

it's that. I don't know. I look at this election and I look at this president and I look at the way he has governed, which is poorly, and the way he has approached his office, which is cruelly. And I don't think it should have been this close. There is a kind of political correctness in journalism where you can say on some level, like the president is doing a bad job and that's sort of okay. You're not ever really supposed to question how voters see him, right? If you're doing that, then you're condescending or something. I think the president is a bad president who operates without a moral compass and he proves that every single day. And just as it unnerved me in 2016, it unnerves me now that so many people find his behavior acceptable.

I don't think it is acceptable. The questionnaire is not like, do I think stimulus multipliers are 2, 3, or 1.2? I think there should be basic standards of decency, and I don't think Donald Trump is above them. I think there should be basic standards of respect for how the American political system functions. I don't think Donald Trump clears them. And so, yes, we had a very high turnout election, but Donald Trump is going to best his numbers from 2016. And that puts a pin in my stomach, if I'm being blunt with you.

And that's not because Donald Trump is a Republican. It's because he is a kind of figure that I had hoped more Americans would reject on a moral level. To say nothing, then, of a competence level, where, as you say, we've had more than 200,000 people die from coronavirus, but the fact that America's had one of the worst responses of any well-off nation has not seemed to affect our politics much at all. So, yeah, my take on this is more pessimistic, I would say. Or maybe it's more realistic. Thanks, Ezra. Thank you. You can hear more of Ezra on his show, The Ezra Klein Show, and we'll have more for you on this election as the story develops this week. It's Today Explained.