The day of the US Presidential election 2020 might be remembered as the day the pundits decided to pull up stumps early and take the rest of the day off.
The first to pull the pin and go and have a long lie down were the bookies who inexplicably installed Trump as a raging favourite deep into the night.
Happy punters could get on Joe Biden at $3.40 at one point (Trump $1.28) with millions of ballots to be counted in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan and the great majority of the ballots to be counted came from mail-in or postal votes likely to favour the Democrats.
There was more movement in that two-horse race market last night than was the case in a certain Novice Handicap at Eagle Farm in 1984 before sanity prevailed and Biden was returned to odds-on favouritism.
Pundits from the left still possessing the thousand yard stare they picked up after the 2016 election or proud “told you so” Trumpers made the same mistake, eyeing Michigan and Pennsylvania where Trump’s leads were in the double digits and Wisconsin where Biden languished behind by up to five points.
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On the US ABC coverage, George Stephanopoulous and his Antony Green-type sidekick playing on a large screen, announced lips quivering that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were exactly as they were in 2016. Oh, the horror.
Meanwhile in Australia the local pundits on our own ABC looked gravely ill, drawing deep breaths and speaking in their most sombre tones of a Trump re-election.
No doubt many resorted to memories that the results of US presidential elections are usually over by late afternoon Australian time and one can knock out a quick oratory to camera and head off to the pub.
Others shared the view of Donald Trump that whoever was in front when it was the POTUS’s bedtime should be declared the winner. While I’m at it, wasn’t it a delight to see an American president regard the post-election phase in a way that Mobuto Sese Seko would have considered a bit beyond the pale?
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Trump complained that the counting had inexplicably stopped which it hadn’t, not in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania or Arizona anyway, and then demanded that it must stop.
The exact result cannot be known until sometime next week when the counters in Alaska resume their trade. Alaska will remain deep red and unsurprisingly, there are no threats of legal action to the state’s supreme court to change the way it is going about its count.
Meanwhile in Nevada where Biden holds a narrow lead, the state election authority announced it would not update its count, left at a tantalising 86 per cent of the vote, until Friday Australian time. I would have thought if there was one thing the people of Nevada were good at it was counting but those talents will be left to languish for a couple of days.
The state of Nevada will count postal ballots received up to a week after polling day provided the ballots are date stamped on or before 3 November. In Alaska, it’s ten days.
Early this morning, I came across a photograph of a counting centre in Philadelphia taken at 2.00am AEDT where six solitary workers sat at a table laboriously counting a large pile of votes. There really has to be a better way.
Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania is now down to five points. With counting to be finalised in Georgia where Trump’s lead has narrowed to 60,000 votes (much of what remains to be counted in Georgia will come from pro-Biden Metro Atlanta). The count in North Carolina has not been updated for 12 hours but with 95 per cent counted, Trump has a 78,000 vote lead which should hold.
But for the sake of argument, I am happy to put all those electoral college votes in Trump’s pile.
Biden holds a 3.4 per cent lead in Arizona and the count there will be called sometime today. Biden has won Wisconsin. With an estimated 97 per cent of the state reporting, he leads in Michigan by 67,000 votes and, Trump’s court action notwithstanding, that count should also conclude today. What remains for the most part includes mail-in ballots from two nominally blue counties, Genessee (Flint) and Kent (Grand Rapids) and the expectation is Biden’s lead will continue to grow.
That will take Biden to 264 with Nevada rousing from its slumber later in the week. Nevada is by no means a lock for Biden, but his narrow lead should hold as most of the postals yet to be counted are coming from blue tinged Clark County (Las Vegas) and Washoe County (Reno and parts of Lake Tahoe).
If Nevada remains a shade of blue, Biden will get to 270 and the presidency. He may yet win Pennsylvania where around a million pre-poll votes are yet to be counted, many of them coming from the deep blue stronghold of Philadelphia County.
Another way of looking at this tortuous pathway, requires spending a little time contemplating the wisdom of the people of the State of Nebraska. Nebraska and Maine are the only two states who split their college votes.
Without a win in District 2 of Nebraska which is essentially the state’s most populous city, Omaha, Biden could be left at 269, as would Trump, leaving the mother of all court battles and one suspects some fairly unhappy campers in the US who would be unable to control their deep seated frustrations and set fire to quite a lot of the country.
Of course, we cannot leave the pollsters out of the analysis. To be fair, polling in the swing states was for the most part within the polling companies’ margins of error. If Pennsylvania does flip blue, they will have got more right than they got wrong. Florida was too close to call and while the rust belt states may have been a touch out, the results fall within the broad parameters of the predictions.
But where things went horribly wrong was the national or popular vote where Biden was predicted to win by on average around six per cent. Biden currently has 50.2 per cent of the 87 per cent of votes counted against President Trump’s 48.3 per cent.
What they got wrong (and I happily admit I did, too) was underestimating Trump’s ability to build on his base from 2016. He will lose the popular vote as expected but not by much. He is a hugely popular figure with great swathes of Americans and win, lose or draw his hold over the GOP is unshakeable.
If you had turned your television off and unplugged your modem last night, you would have gone to bed convinced by the bookies, the pundits and the commentators that Trump had pulled off another feat of electoral magic. As the night wore on to the wee hours this morning, it became clear Joe Biden will almost certainly be the 46th President of the United States.
It’s just a shame you can’t get him at $3.40 anymore.
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