Attention! Get ready for Election Month, not Election Night

By The SATimes News Service

Various media outlets including Washington Post have started warning and preparing America for a worrying scenario on November 3. On election night, President Trump will be ahead significantly in a majority of states, including in the swing states that will decide the outcome. Over the next few days, mail-in ballots will be counted, and the numbers could shift in Joe Biden’s favor. But will Trump accept that outcome? Will the United States?

Several surveys have found that because of the still raging Covid pandemic, in-person and mail-in ballots will show a huge partisan divide. In one poll, 87 percent of Trump voters said they preferred to vote in person, compared with 47 percent of Biden voters. In another, by the Democratic-aligned data firm Hawkfish, 69 percent of Biden voters said they planned to vote by mail, while only 19 percent of Trump voters said the same. The firm modeled various scenarios and found that, based on recent polling, if just 15 percent of mail-in ballots are counted on election night, Trump would appear to have 408 electoral votes compared with Biden’s 130. But four days later, assuming 75 percent of the mail-in ballots are counted, the lead could flip to Biden, and after all ballots are counted, Biden would have 334 electoral votes to Trump’s 204. The methodology used was based in part on polling from FiveThirtyEight in August.

Significantly, during the 2018 midterms, Democrats expanded their new majority in Congress days and weeks after Election Day. In 2020 New York primary, Suraj Patel conceded to Carolyn Maloney weeks after poll day because of continued counting of mail-in ballots.

The liberal media outlets are suggesting  that to avoid chaos on Election Night, TV and print media and pundits have to refute a Trump victory claim as premature, and if the public understands the election results may take several days to congeal, the red mirage may fade pretty quickly. But a new survey from Axios shows a majority of voters still expect a relatively quick result. One in three Americans thinks we’ll know who won the presidential election on the night of Nov. 3, and six in 10 expect the winner to be announced within a couple of days.

The divide on getting the winner on Election night is wide and can get uglier. The 2016 Democratic nominee for President, Hillary Clinton has said this: “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances (on Nov 3 night), because this is going to drag out.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said last Wednesday on Fox that the Trump administration wants to see a presidential winner projected on election night, arguing,  “that’s how the system is supposed to work. And that’s ultimately what we’re looking for and what we’re hoping for.”

Image courtesy of (Chart courtesy NBC)

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