Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This CNN bulletin gives what’s likely to be the final Electoral College tally for Biden (306 votes) and Trump (232 votes). (Click on the screenshot.)
I’m letting you know because I was the first person to call the election for Biden AND to give the correct final Electoral College vote for Uncle Joe. This was in a post on November 5. I ask all the readers to avoid false idols like Nate Silver and recognize the prescience and wisdom of your host, who will now celebrate by taking a nap.
It’s pretty clear by now that there was no widespread vote fraud in the election, as Trump keeps insisting, enabled by Mitch “666” McConnell and the silent Republicans who won’t speak up out of fear of Trump. The New York Times called election officials in all 50 states, asking them about voter fraud. The results won’t be appealing to Republicans:
The New York Times contacted the offices of the top election officials in every state on Monday and Tuesday to ask whether they suspected or had evidence of illegal voting. Officials in 45 states responded directly to The Times. For four of the remaining states, The Times spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state; none reported any major voting issues.
Statewide officials in Texas did not respond to repeated inquiries. But a spokeswoman for the top elections official in Harris County, the largest county in Texas with a population greater than many states, said that there were only a few minor issues and that “we had a very seamless election.” On Tuesday, the Republican lieutenant governor in Texas, Dan Patrick, announced a $1 million fund to reward reports of voter fraud.
Some states described small problems common to all elections, which they said they were addressing: a few instances of illegal or double voting, some technical glitches and some minor errors in math. Officials in all states are conducting their own review of the voting — a standard component of the certification process.
In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State has authorized a hand recount, which is said to be unlikely to reverse Biden’s victory. That recount is only for the top of the ticket, not affecting the two Senate races there, which are critical in determining whether there will be a 50/50 split in the Senate, or whether the GOP will dominate that chamber.
Trump could to at least some extent rehabilitate himself in the eyes of America if he simply issued a civil concession to Biden and exited peacefully. But remember that he’s got a personality disorder, and it’s not in his persona to do that. I’d really be surprised (but pleased) to see a polite concession and a noiseless exit. It doesn’t look like that’s in the cards.
Below is an informative 25-minute summary from the Biden/Harris campaign about Trump’s legal challenges to the election. It makes perfectly clear the clownish maneuvers that Trump’s minions are pulling in court, and also the extreme unlikelihood that any recount will change the overall results.
As Jennifer Rubin notes at The Washington Post,
To summarize: Six pre-election and seven post-election lawsuits by the Trump camp have all been tossed out. They are, as President-elect Joe Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said, “noise.” Campaign counsel Bob Bauer cautioned that what is going on is “theatrics, not lawsuits.” Judges have described claims that the mail-in ballot system is rife with fraud as “fiction” or entirely based on speculation. None of the allegations about excluded poll watchers have been supported by facts. None of the social media memes about changed ballots or other shenanigans have stood up in court.
Interestingly, Trump’s lawyers refuse to say before a real judge that they have found fraud or other reasons to overturn results. (Keep in mind that, since 2000, only a few hundred votes have ever been changed in a single statewide recount.)
.@KamalaHarris Tune in for a post-election legal briefing from our campaign. https://t.co/47MqLepdjX
— Jennifer 'the people have decided' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) November 10, 2020
In a four-minute report, the indefatigable Jake Tapper of CNN shows how members of the Trump administration are refusing to accept the election results. The transfer of power requires that the old administration cooperate with the new, and I’m wondering if there will be any such cooperation.
Jake Tapper does a great job here. It's the right mix of news reporting, astonishment and outrage. And it begins with Biden as the man of the hour, not the deposed would-be autocrat, or any of his dead enders. Watch it. pic.twitter.com/s1ZTgllQkN
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) November 10, 2020
And the tantrum continues:
A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia. He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2020
It’s time for those who bet against me—these were all Democrats who said they’d be glad to pay me if Biden won—to fork over the dosh.
JAC: Note that this post is by Greg, and many readers seem to miss the bylines. This reflects Greg’s views, and comments should be addressed to him. (I’m not saying I disagree with him; that’s just the proper disclaimer!)
by Greg Mayer
I’m writing this on Sunday, November 8, the day after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were projected the winners of the 2020 election, and they can now rightly be called President-elect and Vice President-elect, respectively. Some observations on the election follow.
Something’s gone quite wrong with political polling. For the second presidential election in a row, the polls have been somewhere between not very good and terrible. This was not always the case. In the 2012 election, pundits misunderstood the nature of sampling error, and thus made invalid criticisms of the polls. In that election, most of the error seemed to be sampling error, and thus the poll aggregators did quite well in their prognostications. But in 2016 and 2020 there were large systematic errors. Efforts of pollsters to account for their failings in 2016 and counteract them in 2020 (e.g., stratifying by education, continuing to poll right up to election day) apparently did not work.
The true nature of the errors cannot be fully known until all the votes are in, but a preliminary look shows major deficiencies. As of this writing, Biden leads nationally by 3%, and in Wisconsin by less than 1%. Biden’s national lead will grow as state’s complete their counts, and might even reach 5%, but Wisconsin’s results are essentially complete and will change little, if at all. Here’s what four well known poll aggregators had as their final estimates on the morning of election day:
The Upshot (New York Times): Biden up nationally +8, in Wisconsin +10.
FiveThirtyEight: Biden up nationally +8, in Wisconsin +8.
Electoral-Vote.com: Biden up in Wisconsin +8. (They only aggregate state polls.)
The Economist Biden up nationally +9, in Wisconsin +8.
If Biden finally wins the national popular vote by 5%, that will be near the lower end of what’s compatible with merely sampling error on an 8% lead. But all the aggregators (and thus, on average, all the polls) were way off for Wisconsin. Nate Cohn of The Upshot expressed what apparently happened in a pre-election piece entitled “What Trump Needs to Win: A Polling Error Much Bigger Than 2016’s”. He was absolutely right. There was a bigger polling error in 2020 than in 2016, but it wasn’t big enough.
“All politics is local.” Having been a constituent of Tip O’Neill for some years, I’ve always been fond of his saying that “All politics is local.” This may be less true now than it was when he said it, but Brian Leiter used the phrase when pointing to the article “Queens man evicted“, which appeared in the Queens Daily Eagle, Donald Trump’s home town newspaper. (Other front page articles were “Broken water main floods swath of Oakland Gardens” and “Koo says Flushing Waterfront rezoning has ‘many merits’.”) Money quote from “Queens man evicted”:
A 74-year-old Jamaica Estates developer has less than three months left at his current address after Americans overwhelmingly voted him out of the White House, the AP projected Saturday.
President Donald Trump, a Republican, lost his bid for reelection after a days-long vote count, becoming the 11th commander-in-chief to lose the presidency after a single four-year term and the first major-party candidate from Queens to twice lose the popular vote.
This is my favorite account of the results of the election so far.
The electoral college has got to go. Despite the cliffhanger in the electoral college, it was clear late on election night that Biden would win the popular vote by a substantial amount. Topping 50% of the vote with a difference of 3% (which will likely go up) is actually a convincing win, comparable to Obama’s win in 2012, and greater than any Republican winner since Bush vs. Dukakis in 1988. Only the electoral college made it seem like the result of the election was up in the air.
The electoral college was designed in the late 18th century to deal with the difficulties of communication over a large area with a dispersed population. Only the most well-informed people, living in the cities connected most directly by post roads and shipping, could expect to know what was occurring throughout the country, and who the leading men were. But within states, it would be expected that knowledge would be greater, and that a group of well-informed leaders from each state– the electors– could be elected by the people, and the electors would then gather in a conclave to elect the president and vice president. The electoral college, contrary to what some Republicans say now, was not designed to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority– there are other safeguards in the Constitution for the minority; it was certainly never intended to enable a tyranny of the minority.
In the 19th century, the winner of the popular vote failed to win the presidency three times, the latest in 1888. There were no other such cases till 2000, and it occurred again in 2016, both times putting a popular-vote-losing Republican in office. It almost happened in 2004, when Democrat John Kerry would have won the electoral college with just a small shift of votes in Ohio, despite losing the popular vote; and it could have happened in 2020, where a shift of something on the order of 100,000 votes, distributed among the closest states, would have re-elected Donald Trump, despite a convincing win by Biden in the popular vote.
That in the six presidential elections from 2000 to 2020, the “loser’ became president twice, and that in two other elections it was a close run thing, is intolerable. I don’t know the best way to move to a national popular vote, but it must be done, or else the most powerful official in the country will frequently not be the choice of the people.
“I’m a fan of math. Math doesn’t respond well to opinion.” I’d never encountered John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, before– why would I? But on first impression, I like him.
I may have underestimated Stacey Abrams. I had thought that Stacey Abrams was overhyped, in much the same way as Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg: sure she mounted an interesting challenge a couple of years ago, but she lost fairly convincingly, and had no important political victories. But she organized relentlessly in Georgia, and now Biden has apparently won the state, and both Senate races will go to a runoff. Kudos to her and her Georgia collaborators.
‘People of color’ is not a thing. The election revealed the racialist essentialism of both wokeism and white supremacy to be defective. Although the phrase ‘people of color’ has a distinct, historical meaning in the Francophone world, as does ‘colored people’ in American English (e.g. the NAACP), the recent usage of the phrase in English never seemed meaningful to me. It concatenated people of extremely diverse interests, histories, political inclinations, and races into what was portrayed as a monolithic entity. ‘Latinos’, for example, usually thought of as ‘people of color’ by people who use the term, while correctly identifying aspects of linguistic heritage (although does Portuguese or French count?), encompasses a huge diversity of individual experiences, historical experiences, and races. ‘Latinos’ may be any race– white, black, American Indian, etc.– and any ‘color’: ‘Mexican’ or ‘Cuban’, like ‘American’, is a nationality, not a racial group.
The failure of such facile essentializing is revealed both by (still preliminary) polling data– Trump outpolled all Republicans since Nixon among ‘people of color’, while whites moved toward Biden, and provided the majority of his votes– and by incontrovertible election results. In south Florida, the embrace of Republicans by Cuban-American dominated districts doomed Biden in Florida, and sent two Democratic congresswomen packing. In Wisconsin, American Indian dominated Menominee County was deep blue for Biden, while Robeson County in North Carolina, home of the Lumbee Tribe, went for Trump. It’s amazing how much the woke and white supremacists have in common, and how wrong they are.
Now that’s a concession speech. In 2008, John McCain devoted the beginning of his concession speech to a reflective and evidently heartfelt appreciation of the historic nature of Barack Obama’s victory. I wonder what the opening theme of this year’s concession speech will be?
Wow. Every. Single. Word. Of. This. If you watch only one thing today, please make it this 4 minutes, and remember what America is all about. pic.twitter.com/E2TyermdLR
— Walter Isaacson (@WalterIsaacson) November 7, 2020
Every vote counts. Voting by mail is difficult. Rules vary tremendously, and state and local officials can make it more or less difficult. My daughter votes absentee, and a few weeks before the election she was notified by the city clerk that her ballot had been invalidated because upon opening the envelope her ballot was visible (a ‘naked’ ballot). The clerk had notified her so that she could send another ballot, and remarked that the same flaw was evident in a number of ballots. What evidently happened is that the clerk’s office uses a slicer to open ballot envelopes, and cut open both inner and outer envelopes at once, revealing (and thus spoiling) the ballot. My daughter resent her ballot by Priority Mail, which includes a large, cardboard outer envelope, distinct from the enclosed ballot envelope. Good on the clerk for notifying voters whose ballots were spoiled in this fashion, so that they could be resubmitted.
Although most absentee voters use standard envelopes supplied by the clerk, military and overseas voters supply their own envelopes, of varying sizes, and the opening process was apparently not working with noticeable frequency on these envelopes. I contacted city hall, suggesting this might be an issue for military and overseas voters. The clerk took the suggestion to heart, and quickly informed me that henceforth all military and overseas ballots would be opened by hand. I hope that this enabled a number of voters to successfully cast their ballots.
Biden had more of a ‘ground’ game than I thought. Democrats around the country largely eschewed in-person canvassing and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts due to the pandemic. Here in Wisconsin, the Biden campaign blanketed the media (broadcast, streaming, web), but no one came round, persuading, identifying and encouraging supporters. But they had a sophisticated campaign that I had not anticipated. My daughter got a call from the Biden campaign on the afternoon of election day, telling her that her ballot had been set aside, and not counted. As soon as she could, she called the clerk. The clerk reassured her that her ballot would be counted, but that military and overseas ballots required special handling, and would be processed later.
The reason for this is that military and overseas voters receive their ballots by email, and must print them for filling out and return to the clerk’s office. They are thus on varying paper sizes and thicknesses, and must be copied over for feeding into the vote-counting machines. The Detroit Free Press has a brief explanation:
At 7 p.m., about 1,200 military ballots were still being counted, Detroit election officials said.
Kahn said the process for counting military absentee ballots is complex and takes longer because the ballots have to be re-created.
“It has to be done, by the way, with one GOP and one Democratic challenger at the table,” he said. “They open it up and then they copy the Xeroxed ballot onto a regular size ballot, and that’s the one that gets counted. So it’s a very safe process. There’s a lot of people standing around, challengers, everything.” )
The remarkable thing to me is that a Democratic poll observer at the local polling place (which is where absentee ballots are counted) saw that the ballot had been set aside, knew that it was the ballot of a likely supporter, informed the campaign, and that the campaign could then contact the voter to see if any rectifying actions could be taken, all in ‘real time’. This is ahead of even the Obama campaign’s in-person methods of identifying supporters, and light years ahead of the Gore campaign in 2000, which could only identify favorable wards for GOTV efforts, not individual voters. I was impressed.
“All glory is fleeting.”* Despite the celebrations on Saturday, and Joe Biden’s true-to-form call for unity and reconciliation, I couldn’t help but be mindful of the difficult work ahead, and that success is not guaranteed. I was reminded of the scene in the film A Bridge Too Far, about an unsuccessful Allied offensive in the fall of 1944. Dutch civilians thronged an advancing column of British tanks, singing “War is over!” But the war was not over, and it went on for many horrible months afterwards, even for the Dutch. The same, I fear, is true for the American republic. (* This is not quite what was whispered in the ear of a Roman general celebrating a triumph, but it’s close enough.)
A toast to victory. My family, spread from the Eastern to Pacific time zones, raised a glass to honor Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as they gave their victory speeches on Saturday night.
Know hope.
There’s been some argument around these parts about whether Wokeism will increase or decrease when Trump is gone. On the “increase”, side, Biden is seen as an enabler of Wokeism, supposedly instantiated in his increasing leaning toward the Left, and in the fact that now the “progressive” left now sees a big opportunity to advance its program. (We’ll ignore the Senate for the time being.)
On the “decrease” side, one could argue that Wokeism was aggravated by Trump’s racism and the ascendancy of Republicans, and will calm down after Trump leaves. Some have conjectured, too, that Wokeism is exacerbated by the pandemic: people with not a lot to do can nurture and express their grievances.
My own view is that Wokeism is not going away any time soon, for the fear of being labeled a bigot—one of the main motivation for the excesses of Leftism and identity politics—is too deeply instilled in the Left to disappear. It also dominates liberal media, as well as universities. Biden, while he might not buy into it, won’t repudiate it, either: after all, he’s proclaimed himself the Great Compromiser. So I expect I’ll be at this for a while.
Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, thinks that the election represents a national repudiation of Wokeism, implying that it’s on its way out. Now, he dislikes these excesses as much as I, but the Woke don’t have to be the most numerous to prevail—they just have to be the loudest. Most important, they hold the trump card (excuse me) of being able to play on people’s guilt. And with guilt comes power.
At any rate, Sullivan’s take on the election, in his latest column at The Weekly Dish (now a subscribers-only site), has three interesting takes, all given in the title. I’ll take them in order, giving some quotes and a few reactions of my own. If you’re a subscriber, you can click on the screenshot, but you’ve probably already read his Friday column. I won’t quote him this extensively in the future as people who want to read him should subscribe.
Sullivan’s “Trumpism”: a conservatism he desires. I had thought that Sullivan was slowly moving left, but perhaps the Right just moved further right. At any rate, he sees in the election a repudiation of Trump as a person (Sullivan, who detests him, strongly approves), but not all the principles he stood for, and some of those principles appeal to Sullivan:
This was far from the Biden landslide I had been dreaming about a few weeks back. It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. It was the moment that Trump’s core message was seared into one of our major political parties for the foreseeable future, and realigned American politics. If Trump were sane, this is how he would describe his success — and leave office graciously to become the kingmaker in his own party. But he is not sane.
His impact, however, is undeniable. Neoconservatism is over; globalization as some kind of conservative principle is over; a conservatism that allows for or looks away from unrestrained mass immigration is over. What was cemented in place this week is a new GOP, not unlike the new Tories in the UK. They’re nationalist, culturally conservative, geared toward the losers of capitalism as well as its winners, and mildly protectionist and isolationist. It is a natural response to the unintended consequences of neoliberalism’s success under a conservative banner. And it speaks in a language that working class Americans understand, devoid of the woke neologisms of the educated elite. It seems to me that this formula is a far more settled and electorally potent coalition than what we now see among the deeply divided Democrats.
Now Sullivan doesn’t come straight out and say he likes this new kind of conservatism, but given what I know of his opinions, I think he does. And I’m not sure that his “new GOP” is really a thing, especially when he says it’s geared “toward the losers of capitalism as well as its winners.” Some of those losers are working-class whites, but many are people of color. It’ll be a cold day in July when blacks and Hispanics see the GOP as their party, despite their movement towards it in this election and despite the socialists’ claim that class rather than color is important. If they’re right, capitalism’s “victims” should be on the Democrats’ side.
Trump’s appeal. I mentioned the other day that I think it’s both foolish and divisive to characterize everyone who voted for Trump as a racist. Many, I think, are not, but were either voting their pocketbook or wanted a law-and-order regime to counteract this summer’s protests. I was pleased to see that Sullivan agrees.
. . . this is where I think I have been wrong about Trump’s appeal, and where I think I’ve misunderstood why otherwise decent people could support such a foul disrupter of democratic norms. Many of them simply didn’t take Trump’s threat to our system seriously. They took all his assaults on democracy as so much bluster from the kind of car salesman he is. They deal with this kind of bullshit all the time, took liberal democracy for granted and saw little reason to fret about its future. The writer Jamie Kirchick says that everything Trump says makes sense if it is preceded by the following words: “And now, Donnie from Queens, you’re on the air.” Many people heard Trump exactly that way, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. They weren’t endorsing his madness. They were looking past it. They were, in my opinion, wrong to be so cavalier. But I don’t think most were malignant extremists of any kind, or unaware of the hideous personal qualities of Trump.
And they enjoyed economic rewards that, absent the Covid19 recession, might well have swept Trump to victory. One of the more revealing results from the polls this year came in the answers to the core question made famous by Reagan: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” In previous campaigns to re-elect the president, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide with only 44 percent saying they were better off, George W. Bush won with 47 percent and Obama succeeded with 45 percent. For Trump, a mighty 56 percent said they were better off now than when he took office — a fundamental along with incumbency that should have led to a landslide re-election — and yet he still lost. That tells you something about Americans’ understanding of how unfit a president Trump turned out to be, even as they felt very good about their own wellbeing.
Many—perhaps most—Americans vote based on their own advancement, or lack thereof, under the last administration. (Even law and order is about personal safety rather than societal safety.) This is, again, something that much of the Left fails to understand. I don’t know if it explains the higher-than-expected vote for Trump, but if we’re to make any progress in the next four years, we have to stop the total demonization of our opponents. And that means we should stop tossing the term “racist” around cavalierly, and telling everyone they’re either an explicit or a secret racist.
Which brings us to Wokeism. As I noted, Sullivan sees the election as a repudiation of at least the “Woke Left”, and of identity politics.
[The election] was also clearly and unequivocally a rejection of the woke left. The riots of the summer turned many people off. In exit polls, 88 percent of Trump voters say it was a factor in their choice. On the question of policing and criminal justice, Trump led Biden 46 — 43 percent. For the past five years, Democrats have been telling us that Trump and his supporters were white supremacists, that he was indeed the “First White President” in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words, that all minorities were under assault by the modern day equivalent of the KKK. And yet, the GOP got the highest proportion of the minority vote since 1960! No wonder Charles Blow’s head exploded. [Note that he cites Blows’s editorial I discussed yesterday.]
We may find out more as exit polling is pored over, but in the current stats, Trump measurably increased his black, Latino, gay and Asian support. 12 percent of blacks — and 18 percent of black men — backed someone whom the left has identified as a “white supremacist”, and 32 percent of Latinos voted for the man who put immigrant children in cages, giving Trump Florida and Texas. 31 percent of Asians and 28 percent of the gay, lesbian and transgender population also went for Trump. The gay vote for Trump may have doubled! We’ll see if this pans out. But it’s an astonishing rebuke of identity politics and its crude assumptions about how unique individuals vote.
Why did minorities shift slightly rightward after enduring four years of Trump? First off, many obviously rejected the narrative being pushed out by every elite media source: that the core of Trump’s appeal was racism. They saw a more complicated picture. I suspect that many African-Americans, for example, were terrified of “defunding the police” and pleased to be economically better off, with record low unemployment before Covid19 hit. Many legal Latino citizens, perplexing leftists, do not want continued mass immigration, and are socially conservative. Asians increasingly see the woke as denying their children fair access to education, and many gays just vote on various different issues, now that the civil rights question has been largely resolved by the Supreme Court.
Obviously a big majority of non-white and non-straight voters still backed Democrats. But the emergence of this coalition of minority conservatives is fascinating — and, of course, a complete refutation of what critical race theory tells us how minorities must feel. Ditto the gender gap. It’s there, but not quite the gulf we were led to believe. We have again been told insistently that being female in America today is a constant nightmare of oppression, harassment, violence and misogyny; and that no one represents this more potently than Donald “grab ‘em by the pussy” Trump. And yet white women still voted for Trump 55 to 43 percent. Among white women with no college education, arguably those most vulnerable to the predations of men, Trump got 60 percent support. This is not a wave of rage; and it suggests that the left’s notion of patriarchy is, in 2020, something many, many women just don’t buy, or do not believe should outweigh other, more important issues.
I’d like to think that Sullivan is right here, and he may well be. But the Woke are still there, writing for the New York Times and the New Yorker, filling the colleges with highly-paid diversity consultants, and agitating to defund the cops. All it takes for them to prevail is for others on the Left to go along from fear of being called a bigot or of being excoriated on social media.
Here’s Van Jones, author and correspondent, responding to Anderson Cooper’s request on CNN for his take on the election results.
I think many of us are barely holding in the tears right now. It’s not time for the nay-sayers to bring up the Senate, the lawsuits, the long road ahead. It’s time to finally let go of the anger and tension that we’ve held inside for four years. And that’s what Jones does.
h/t: Rick
America has voted its way out of trouble, but it was a squeaker!
This is based on the results in Pennsylvania, which put Biden over the threshhold. Just remember that Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) was the first to call the election.
Click on the screenshot:
