161–170 of 206 posts
This is getting flagged every 2 minutes. What is going on?
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If people agree it was tumultuous why was the race still so close? I really think adding little adjectives like that undermines the respectedness of the NYT
Was it close? Seems like it just took a long time to process mail in ballots because the administration tried its best to invalidate them and decrease their legitimacy. Furthermore tumultuous does not equate to unpopular. Perhaps his supporters enjoy the chaos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was no blue wave, if anything Biden has barely squeaked past the post. Trump under-performed his 2016 margins in 38 states, including many deep red ones.
Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!
There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]:
"There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places. But because each state has its own rules for how votes are counted and reported, some will report results sooner than others. Those disparate rules may also make initial returns misleading: The margins in some states may shift toward Democrats as mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly cast by Democrats) are counted, while states that release mail ballots first may experience a shift toward Republicans as Election Day votes are tallied."
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-results-timing...
If people agree it was tumultuous why was the race still so close? I really think adding little adjectives like that undermines the respectedness of the NYT
It wasn't all that close. Of six elections (including this one) since 2000, at least 3 and possibly 4 (votes are still being counted) were closer in popular vote, and 3 were closer in electoral vote (based on what has been called so far, regardless of how the uncalled states go.
But it was particularly actively contested, with both high turnout and high passions on both sides, which is exactly what “tumultuous” means.
Voter suppression. Voting in a working day. Need to register for voting. Legal battles. Inconsistent rules. A refusing to leave president. Is this the model of government that the USA bomb other countries for?
We just had an election with widespread mail in voting with extended deadlines and historic turnout. And if anything Trump’s support among non-white voters went up. What does that suggest re: the scale of voter suppression?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/07/re...
edit- spelling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!
The Democrats maintained control of the House. There were 435 seats up for election, and a majority went to the Democrats. In 2018 they had their biggest House win ever, so it's not that surprising that a couple seats when back toward the Republicans. Senate control is still an open issue. There will be a runoff in GA in January to determine control. The only reason this was under contention days after the election i…
My understanding is that Republicans were projected to lose even more seats this election - in the 10-20 range - and instead gained seats. So yeah, surprising.
I'm not entirely sure how Georgia's senate runoffs work.
> The only reason this was under contention days after the election is that PA wasn't able to start counting their mail in ballots until election day. This was a choice made by the PA legislature. I don't know why. If PA was allowed to precanvas, PA would have announced like FL on election night and this would have been over Tuesday.
Well, maybe. PA still looks to be within 50k votes, and while it's possible that precanvassing would have allowed the election to be called on Tuesday night, the policy of accepting votes postmarked up to election night even if they arrived late would still leave things potentially up for grabs. And there's a LOT of close states this year. (And to answer "why", I believe it's to prevent vote counts from leaking before people actually go and vote)
The more general point that "If there was a blue wave, we wouldn't be worrying about states with margins of under 50k votes or talking about how control of the senate will be determined later" still stands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
False. That was actual facts put out by the Pennsylvania secretary of state, and reiterated by the local officials in every single district in the state of Pennsylvania. All of the ballot-counting has been under the watch of observers on both sides of the aisle, including especially multiple Republican observers. Republican observers have confirmed that ballots that arrived after the deadline have either not been cou…
False. Find me the statement. All they said was that the ballots had been segregated, not that they hadn't been counted.
The late-arriving ballots were both physically segregated, and counted separately from the timely ballots by separate government employees, in pairs including one Democrat and one Republican. Before numbers are reported, the numbers in each batch are confirmed by employees locally and at the state level to make sure they match the number of ballots in that batch, and these numbers are reviewed by Democratic and Republican employees.
Segregated numbers have not been reported in this manner because the courts ordered them not to, so the numbers are kept separately and were not included in the official count. Because of the court order, most of the segregated ballots have not yet been counted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pennsylvania-ballots... (noting that Alito's order had no effect because that was what the ballot officials were already doing as a result of earlier state court orders.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!
>The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election There were a number of factors that pretty much guaranteed the delays we've seen, all of which had lots of press coverage long before election day[0]: "There’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election on election night. More people than ever are voting by mail this year due to the pandemic, and m…
49.7% to 49.2% is a HELL of a lot closer than the D+6 projections I saw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was no blue wave, if anything Biden has barely squeaked past the post. Trump under-performed his 2016 margins in 38 states, including many deep red ones.
Yes, Trump underperformed relative to 2016 - and yet the Republicans made gains in the House, and maintained control of the Senate. The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night should be evidence enough that there wasn't a significant blue wave!
That's kind-of true. They've definitely maintained it through the end of the Trump Administration, since when the Senate convenes it will be 48-48 with two vacancies to be settled by runoffs two days later, and Pence will still be VP. But as of January 21, the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs will decide the balance of the Senate.
> The fact that the presidential race is close enough to still be under contention days after election night
It's not particularly close, it just has an unusually hard to project due to the pattern of vote counts resulting from one candidate urging voters not to vote by mail-in ballots, large mail-in vote totals, and the timing of mail-in ballot counts vs. counts of in-person ballots in various states. Both by popular and electoral votes, it's going to be less close than the average election of the 2000s.
“Easy to project the winner” and “close” are generally correlated, but fundamentally different, qualities, and this is a case where the usual relationship between them did not hold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Presidential election results of a major nation is extremely relevant despite being political, thus the qualifier most .