Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Joe Biden speaks at a drive-in rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds, October 29, 2020, in Tampa.
If Joe Biden wins a decisive victory tonight, one paradoxical player will be Fox News. Though Fox commentators are part of the Trump spin machine, Fox’s technical experts at its “decision desk” are famous for playing it straight.
The desk is led by Arnon Mishkin, who heads a group of pollsters, statisticians, and social scientists who are fully insulated from the Fox talking heads. In 2018, Fox correctly called the big midterm win for House Democrats.
In earlier elections, Mishkin has fended off political pressure from Karl Rove to shade calls. Fox also prides itself on its polling unit, which is one of the most professional and well insulated.
The L.A. Times recently published the definitive piece on how and why Fox manages to keep its decision desk protected from its propagandists. Throughout the election year, Trump has been infuriated when his favorite network did not deliver the polling results he wanted.
So if Biden does win Florida, we can expect even Fox to call Florida for Biden. And that will be devastating and maybe fatal for the Trump story line.
Happily, Florida will be one of the earliest to report. And Florida has been trending Biden.
After the fiasco in 2000, Florida has become quite proficient at ballot counting. Unlike several other swing states, Florida law permits early and mail-in ballots to be tallied long before Election Day. Since lots of Republicans as well as Democrats vote early in the Sunshine State, both parties have supported these reforms.
Elsewhere, there will be a tug-of-war between Fox’s election experts and the spin doctors who contend, with Trump, that counting must be frozen as of election night. As every serious person knows, in even a moderately close election, final results are not tallied for a few more days, and this was the case long before this year’s surge of early and mail-in ballots.
In our office pool, I bet that Biden would win Florida and a total of 303 electoral votes, even without Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, whose final results will not be known for several more days. Biden could easily win by carrying the states where he is leading, whose results will be virtually final by Wednesday morning.
At that point, the pressure mounts on two sets of players to insist that Trump must concede. One is the group of very senior Republicans who have not yet weighed in. The most important of those is George W. Bush.
Thus far, Bush has declined to join other former top GOP officials in speaking out against Trump, though the Biden campaign did make the request. There is no love lost between the two men, especially given Trump’s treatment of brother Jeb Bush.
It’s one thing for a former Republican president to decline to get involved in a campaign. It’s quite something else when a thuggish president tries to steal an election by grossly illegal means.
If Biden is the clear winner, Bush needs to speak out and bring along other senior Republicans, to demand in the name of American democracy that Trump concede defeat.
The other major player is the U.S. Supreme Court. Even if Biden wins by a landslide, there will be over 300 lawsuits filed by Republicans at various levels of government seeking to disallow ballots and stop counts, using the flimsiest of pretexts.
When the first of these cases reaches the high court, the justices, led by John Roberts, need to send a clear signal that they will not play this partisan game to overturn a clear election victory. Roberts will have a conservative Court for the rest of his lifetime. That should be enough. He does not need to use the Supreme Court to allow a dictator to end American democracy as well.
Feeling a little better? Well, if Biden doesn’t win a clear victory, that’s another story, and we are in for a long slog.
And even if Trump does concede defeat, he will occupy the White House for another 11 weeks. God only knows what he will do.
Still, on election night, Florida could provide a ray of sunshine.
