Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Pedestrians stop to watch election results on the electronic billboards in Times Square, Tuesday, November 3, 2020, in New York.
If you stayed up half the night watching the returns, you probably felt sucker punched. Hey, Biden is leading in Florida. Oops, no he isn’t. Latinos break big for Trump in Miami-Dade.
And Biden is well ahead in Ohio, of all places. Oh, here come the red counties and Ohio is gone. And Biden could win North Carolina. Wait, no he can’t.
You probably went to bed stunned, recalling that Biden wasn’t your first choice; that in the last debate, never mind whatever the post-debate polls said, he looked meek and mild and passed up 50 chances for rejoinders. So now you are braced for a long final count and a long interregnum.
But there is a shadow election that you didn’t watch, barely mentioned in the breathless TV coverage that deceptively made Election 2020 look just like a normal election night.
Apparently, there was not a lot of outright voter suppression on Election Day, but there was a ton of pre-theft well before November 3.
For starters, 19 states controlled by Republicans imposed needlessly strict photo ID requirements that disproportionately kept potential Democratic voters away from the polls. Fourteen states toughened requirements on the eve of the 2016 election.
According to the Brennan Center, some 11 percent of eligible voters, or 25 million Americans, do not have government-issued photo ID. If Georgia, Texas, and Ohio, to name three swing states, had merely normal ID requirements, they could have been easy Biden wins.
And in Florida, the Republican legislature’s defiance of a ballot initiative restoring the right of former felons to vote, with requirements to pay back fees and fines, literally cost Biden millions of potential votes.
We’ll never know how many votes Trump’s attempt to create mayhem in the Postal Service cost Biden, but it has to be well into the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. So even though Biden ran a mediocre campaign, in a normal election without the multiple forms of Republican pre-suppression he would have cruised to victory.
Other forms of voter suppression on Election Day 2020 have yet to be reported in detail. There were scattered reports of long lines and crude maneuvers such as limiting Harris County, Texas, to just one early drop-off ballot box.
Early indications are that Election Day suppression in 2020 was not as grotesque as in 2016. But the structural suppression was baked into the cake.
Did you hear any of that in last night’s play-by-play? I didn’t.
All that said, I still expect Biden to be the eventual winner. He will win Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Maine. He still has an outside chance of carrying Georgia. By the time all the Michigan early votes are counted, he will probably manage a narrow victory there. That gets him to 270 electoral votes without Pennsylvania or Georgia.
And the Times’ Nate Cohn has just reported that if Biden wins the remaining early votes to be counted in Pennsylvania as he has the ones already counted, the final tally in that state will be Biden 50.3, Trump 48.5.
I’m also optimistic that as Republicans file a blizzard of lawsuits attempting to block ballots or overturn state results, even this Supreme Court will not intervene to defy the will of the voters. Though the prospect of a long and terrifying interregnum looms, we will get a sense of the high court’s intentions soon, as it starts swatting down frivolous cases.
Though his path is very narrow, we can still expect Biden to be the next president. The Senate is a far more improbable reach. But a fair election would have been a landslide.
