What A Day - Biden Rising

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

A significant number of ballots were counted yesterday in states where races have been too close to call, leading to gains for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia. At this point, Trump would need everything to break his way to win the election—and that doesn’t seem likely. Biden’s campaign continued to project confidence yesterday, while Trump did a press conference where he tried out every anti-Democratic lie he could think of. Looking at the Senate races: the Ossoff/Perdue race in Georgia got even tighter yesterday, meaning there will be a runoff election in January. This will take place alongside the Warnock/Loeffler runoff, and could allow the Democrats to tie up the Senate. And in headlines: rising tensions in Ethiopia lead to fears of civil war, Jared Kushner’s apartment company tries to evict hundreds during the pandemic, and another new lava planet we can move to.Show Links:votesaveamerica.com/protect

It's Friday, November 6th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick. And this is What The Day, where we are entering week four of Election Day. Yeah, it feels like that, at least. Honestly, it might only be week three. Yeah, by my calculations, November 3rd was last year. God, we were so much younger then. We truly were. On today's show, the count continues, then some headlines. Democracy is sometimes messy.

It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that's been the envy of the world. We continue to feel, Senator and I, we continue to feel very good about where things stand. We have no doubt that when the count is finished, Senator Harris and I will be declared the winners. Oh, wow. That was Joe Biden speaking yesterday in Wilmington, Delaware. All right, guys, big picture. We still don't have an official call on the presidential race, and no additional states have been called in either direction since yesterday. But they're still counting, which is normal and good.

We are recording this at 8.30 p.m. Pacific, 11.30 p.m. Eastern. Biden still stands at 253 electoral votes to Trump's 214. But the big story from yesterday is that a significant number of ballots were counted in the states where the races have been too close to call, with the exception, obviously, of North Carolina. And overall, the counts have Biden on the brink of winning. He's just not there yet. Gideon, let's go through state by state, starting with Pennsylvania and Georgia, where Trump

was leading. OK, so these are the two states that Democrats were watching intently last night as more ballots were tallied. Throughout the night, as votes were reported in Pennsylvania, the trend line was extremely clear. The overwhelming share of the votes were going in Biden's direction. Specifically, a lot of the remaining votes were coming in from places like Philadelphia, where Biden's margins were just through the roof. And that has to do with the point that we've hit consistently. Democrats favoring absentee and mail voting and the state counting those types of ballots after Election Day ballots, which went heavily in Trump's favor. So as of 1130 Eastern,

Trump's margin was down to less than 27,000 votes with less than 200,000 left to count overall. And it's possible by the time you're hearing this, Biden could have taken the lead. One thing that we've been watching also with Pennsylvania is how cautious news outlets are being in terms of making any predictions. It's 20 electoral votes would give Biden the presidency. It's a whole ballgame on its own. And all of Trump's lying about the vote counting process is definitely seeming to impact the broader caution. Yeah. And then there's Georgia. That is right. So on our last episode, we were highlighting the fact that Biden was also narrowing the gap here, which is insane, pretty rapidly, too, with a lot of outstanding votes that were from areas favorable to him. And so by 1130 Eastern, again, Trump was

leading by a tiny margin of less than 2000 votes, with about 14,000 more to count. We're also anticipating an updated count out of Clayton County that could conceivably put Biden in the lead in the next couple of hours. Georgia is worth 16 electoral votes. So if it ends up in the Biden column, he will be just one electoral vote shy of the presidency. And then at the very least for Biden in the craziest scenario that probably won't happen, but because of this year, maybe it would lead to an electoral college tie that would be broken by the House. But given the extremely tight margin in Georgia, even if Biden does take that lead, which people think could happen, news outlets might actually hold off on calling the state right away.

Right. And then the other two states where there was movement were Arizona and Nevada. These are the two states where Biden currently leads with more votes to be counted. Yeah. So let's start with Arizona. The tricky situation there is that Fox News and the AP called that race for Biden already. They called it pretty early. Trump was apparently apoplectic about the Fox call, freaking out about it. And on Wednesday night, supporters of the president showed up to protest at a voting center in Maricopa. I'm sure people have seen the videos of that. But other outlets sort of held their fire here because there were still ballots that needed to be counted. And they thought there was more uncertainty in terms of the projections.

And in this instance, actually, the trend line was moving in Trump's direction as more votes came in. With the latest batch of data that came largely from Maricopa County, the state's most populous county, Biden was leading Trump in the state overall by about 46,000 votes. That's around 1130 Eastern, with around 200,000 more votes to count. Officials said that we can also anticipate more votes reported today. So Arizona is 11 electoral votes on its own with none of the other outstanding states. It wouldn't give Biden the presidency, but that brings us to Nevada. We've all seen the memes and the TikToks about the state and their slow count, but there were votes tallied on Thursday and they showed Biden widening the gap with Trump. As of 1130 Eastern on Thursday, Biden was leading by about 12,000 votes. That gap was coming mostly from additional votes out of Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas. And we're anticipating that the next batch of votes is going to get reported today.

But here's the key thing about what we know. We're expecting that a bulk of those votes are also out of Clark County, something like 90% of what's going to be reported. And if Biden holds the lead of around eight points overall in the county, the expectation is that the state is certainly tilting in his direction, and that his margin could actually expand later today. So then at the end of the day, where does this leave us in terms of the overall map? Like, where are we? Well, I'm trying to do my best Kornacki here. I think, you know, we made this point before. But the fact of the matter is that Biden just has many more chances to seal this up than Trump. That is just the truth, no matter how you

lay it out. So right now, Trump would need basically everything to break his way. And it is not, as we mentioned, the only state where he's closing the gap is Arizona. And it's not clear that Biden is ultimately going to lose the lead there either. For Biden, though, it's simply just getting Pennsylvania, that's it, or two of the three other states, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. And in a situation where all four went his way, Biden would end up with 306 electoral votes, which is what Trump got in 2016. And final point, super quick. We had talked about Trump coming up with these conspiracy theories about voting by mail. And that seems like it could have been a possible discouragement to Republican voters to do just that. We're seeing some of that in practice, these conspiracy theories about voting by mail. And that seems like it could have been a possible

discouragement to Republican voters to do just that. We're seeing some of that in practice, right? I mean, Republicans came out in huge, huge numbers on election day, and Democrats overwhelmed them in some of these places with mail-in votes. So the way that this is being tabulated is a reflection of that, plain and simple. You could pretty easily imagine a universe where everything got reported the night of, and we'd be looking at a map at that point with Biden leading. All right. Well, let's do a quick update on the campaign's response. Okay, so this is continuing the trend of the use here. The Biden campaign has continued to project confidence about the counting. They're saying they believe they're on track to win, as we heard in the clip at the top of the show.

Meanwhile, Trump did this press conference, I guess, yesterday from the White House, where he talked about how well Republicans had done down ballot and then spewed a bunch of this anti-democratic bullshit lies again about the presidential election being stolen from him because mail ballots are corrupt. He also at one point got into the weeds on bad polls and said they suppressed his vote. All three major networks, NBC, ABC and CBS cut away from the speech pretty quickly. Finally. Yes. Then earlier in the day, too, Trump tweeted in all caps, quote, Stop the count and other things that Twitter had to put warning labels on. By the way, too, like if the states did stop counting right now, Trump would lose the election

because Biden is currently ahead in Nevada and Arizona. So aside from this being dangerous and terrible, Trump's messaging also doesn't make a lot of sense if you're trying to win. Anyway, later, Vice President Pence tweeted that he wanted to, quote, count every legal vote with an emphasis on legal. So, you know, trying to thread the needle there, I guess. And the campaign is continuing to try to fight this in the courts with, how shall we say, limited success. Right. And on that front, so judges in Georgia and Michigan dismissed lawsuits over vote counting from the Trump campaign yesterday.

But a judge in Pennsylvania did rule in Trump's favor in one of the several cases his campaign is filed there. The ruling allows campaign observers to watch the vote counting up close. It's like literally a four foot difference. Then lastly, in Nevada, the Trump campaign said they would file a suit claiming that votes were cast illegally by people who had moved or were dead. Honestly, the straws that they're grasping at, there's not even that many left. All of these tactics are what we expected from Trump and his campaign, though. And for now,

most people outside of Trump, his family members and loyalists like Sean Hannity, they're all focused on getting to a full counting of the votes. Yeah, I think Sean would hope that he is considered family in certain respects. Also, though, as an aside, you know, Republicans aren't going to look at the map from this week and say widespread fraud happened because they did well down ballot. It would be like saying we did poorly, but you did OK. And in some of the states being discussed here, the officials in charge of elections are Republicans. So on that note, let's talk about where things stand with the Senate. All right. So the presidential race is

obviously super important, but we have an excellent update for the Senate races as well. Yesterday, we explained the uphill battle for Democrats to take a majority in the Senate. Well, that incline just got a little less steep. In Georgia, the Ossoff-Purdue Senate race got even tighter yesterday, with Republican incumbent David Perdue's vote share falling below the 50 percent mark, meaning Perdue is projected to head to a runoff with Democratic challenger John Ossoff, which will take place in January alongside the Warnock-Loffler runoff. And this could be major. Even if the Senate is completely split, if Democrats pull off these wins and Biden wins, then Kamala Harris will be the deciding vote on any stalemate legislation. So again, huge and something that we're going to be keeping track of. If you live in Georgia,

go to votesaveamerica.com slash register. If you aren't registered yet, it's a little bit of shade here, but you know what? Fine. I forgive you. Help us bring this home in January. And we also have to shout out Stacey Abrams and her organization Fair Fight Action for enfranchising so many people in Georgia. And shout out to all of you for helping Crooked raise more than $2 million in that effort this year. Yeah, and it's worth remembering, too, that special elections are traditionally hard to win, especially against incumbents. But with Georgia maybe going blue for only the second time in our entire lifetimes, it may be possible for Democrats to do this. Moving on, though, let's talk about the House. With everything else going

on, we haven't had a chance to really get into that. Right. So the big picture is even though the Democrats are expected to keep control, they're also expected to lose some seats. That's been very disappointing for Democrats and a surprise for the party and pollsters. I mean, everything's a surprise for the pollsters. The expectation was that Dems would not only hold on to the giant wave of gains they picked up in 2018, but also grow their majority. Not all of the House races have been called, but so far, according to the New York Times and the AP, Republicans have gained back a net of six seats, many of them taken back from Democratic freshmen. There were losses for Dems in South Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South

Carolina. And it's already leading to some finger pointing in the party about what went wrong, with some moderates criticizing the progressive wing of the party for being too far left on issues like fracking and police reform. That's according to leaks from a call of the House Dem caucus yesterday. Progressives reportedly pushed back by saying that it's the left wing of the party that's driven so much of the energy and political engagement in recent years. So lots to get into in the coming days. And again, the results are still coming in. So there's still a lot of data to come before we can draw solid conclusions. But guess what, guys? That's the latest. It's Friday, WOD Squad. And for today's Tim Check, we're talking about a TV show we are not being paid to promote.

Like, seriously, we're not. You know, we would totally consider it if offered the opportunity. But it's The Masked Dancer, which is going to premiere on Fox in December. The show is a spinoff of The Masked Singer with a concept that seems way more dangerous. Now celebs do choreographed dance numbers in masks and a panel of judges have to guess who the celebs are. So Giddy, now that we're seeing masked spinoffs, you know, what activity do you want to see the celebrities do in masks the next time one of these shows comes out? OK, here's my pitch.

Team basketball. It's like NBA All- out. Okay, here's my pitch. Team basketball. It's like NBA All-Star Weekend, the celeb game. You know, you have like Bieber, Jamie Foxx, mix in some, you know, older basketball players, Chauncey Billups, et cetera, so forth. They're all wearing masks. They have to compete as teams. And we see, you know, who is like skillful

and doing like alley-oops, who's getting good assists, we see, you know, who is like skillful and doing like alley oops, who's getting good assistance, et cetera, so forth. And then when the inevitable team wins or loses, everybody takes the masks off and then we have to see, you know, who was good at their basketball skills. Just my pitch. Wow. I mean, I kind of like that. I do think that like, if you're trying to do a masked sport, like a sport where they wear like headgear

is fine you know like a football mask it's just one more piece to put in there um but i i actually think that would be really interesting a lot of people getting hit in the back of the head with a basketball though probably right so it's basically grading skills on a curve like can you make a three if you can't see yeah some some people could some people could not and that's what we would find out on the masked basketball players. But same question. Akilah, what are you thinking here? You know, I have a hard time coming up with this because

everything I'm thinking of, like people don't see people like I was like, oh, the mask like podcast thing. But like people just know the voices. That's literally the opposite. So yeah, maybe it's just like the mask like dentist like just like based mask dentist.

Just based on the dental work that they're able to do on people, they're like, oh, that's definitely a Kim Kardashian-style front tooth. I know that anywhere. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, or how much damage is inflicted by the person with a mask during the process. You know, if they're really good, they're getting that worked out. Like if it's Kanye, he's probably distracted, so he might feel a little messed up. Yeah, I think that's good. They're like, if it's Kanye, he's probably distracted. So I feel messed up. Yeah. I think that's good.

I think, you know, as like a, an hour block, this is a solid two for two mask show back to back. I mean, we need content now that Quibi's gone. So like,

I feel like we're doing the Lord's work, but just like that, we've checked our temps, stay safe, wear a mask, and we'll be back after some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. All four ex-cops charged with George Floyd's death will be tried

at the same time. A judge in Minneapolis ruled yesterday that holding a single trial for the officers would ensure that the jurors understand all the evidence and get the complete picture of George Floyd's death. In his ruling, he also wrote that it would, quote, allow this community, this state, and the nation to absorb the verdicts for the four defendants at once. The former officers, including Derek Chauvin, originally asked for a change of venue because they had concerns that the publicity of the case would prevent them from having a fair trial. But the judge decided the trial will remain in the Twin Cities. Prosecutors argued the defendants should face a jury of their peers in the same city where the tragedy took place. Good. Tensions have been rising in Ethiopia this past week, leading many to fear that a civil war

will break out between the nation's government and the ruling party of a small, wealthy region called Tigray. It all started in September when the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF, held their regional election despite the federal government requesting all elections be postponed due to the pandemic. In response, Ethiopian lawmakers decided to punish the party by cutting off federal funding to the region. Then on Wednesday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed accused the TPLF of attacking a military camp and decided to deploy troops to Tigray. The president of the region denies the attack. Yesterday, Ethiopia's military said it was, quote, at war with the region. Internet and phone connections in Tigray have been cut off for two consecutive days, so it's been hard to find reports about details or casualties.

Yikes. Senior White House advisor Jared Kushner didn't let his time running a COVID task force affect his commitment to despising people. The apartment company Kushner partly owns, Westminster Management, is now trying to evict hundreds of tenants who are struggling to pay rent in the midst of the pandemic. Kushner's POV is if somebody can't keep their apartment, they should just go to their summer house, their lake house, their mystery house, or their moon house. He just doesn't understand that the only people who have those things are him, his wife, and

every person he's ever been friends with. He doesn't have friends. Yeah, that's true. Good fact check. In Maryland, where the apartments are located, courts can't order people removed from their homes right now. And a CDC ban allows tenants to halt eviction proceedings through the end of the year. But that doesn't stop landlords from filing paperwork and threatening court fees, which can allow them to pressure people into leaving on their own. Experts anticipate a surge in evictions when the CDC moratorium ends.

Through the pandemic, landlords have filed for nearly 100,000 evictions already. Some advice for Mr. Kushner, if you need something to evict, consider evicting the demon spirit from your body that is eating you from the inside. Or maybe evict your father-in-law from the White House, you know? Just spitballing. We've all thought about where we're going to move if this election goes sideways, and now there's one more option to consider. It's a newly discovered exoplanet called K2-141b, where it rains rocks all day and the oceans are made of lava. Sick. Honestly, I'm in if I can get my own parking spot. The extreme temperatures on K2-141b are a result of its close proximity to its host star. It's also gravitationally locked to that star,

meaning one side is in perpetual light in around 5,400 degrees and the other side is perpetually dark in around negative 328 degrees. This contrast creates weather patterns like supersonic winds that whip from one side of the planet to the other, carrying molten rocks. This is the kind of weather that the Republicans of our planet will say is good and nothing to worry about in around 25 years. K2-141b is hundreds of light years away, and most of what scientists know about it was determined using mathematical modeling. A space telescope, though,

is set to launch in 2021, and it will allow them to visually confirm their predictions. Tell me when it launches so I know when to dress up and pose on my new home planet. I can't wait. I'm going to get hit with a molten rock. I love the lava water. And those are the headlines. One last thing before we go. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in a position to win this election, but the Trump team is essentially throwing a legal tantrum. Crooked's Every Last Vote Fund protects the results of the election by supporting the Biden campaign and the Democratic parties in Georgia,

Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in their legal fights against the Trump campaign's unfounded claims and in their voter protection efforts. Chip in to make sure that these teams can conduct any recounts and fight Trump's legal team in court. VoteSaveAmerica.com slash protect. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, limit your time watching cable news, and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading and not just the deed to your new home on the lava planet like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And maybe next time we see you, we'll know our next president. I hope so. That's cool. That would be nice. Knowing is good. Knowing something is nice.