Election 2020: Thursday Night Nevada's Blue, Friday I'm In Dystopia
It looks like vote counting will finally start finalizing up (except for Nevada, which will announce its final vote count sometime in May) so we can see a clear picture going into the all-important next step: Spurious Legal Challenges!
NV: 89% of votes counted, Biden ahead 0.9%. This could still go either way (the remaining votes are from Clark County/Las Vegas) but it looks fairly good for Biden.
AZ: 90% of votes counted, Biden ahead 1.6%. Maricopa County still has about 200,000 ballots to report, up to now they have been 51/47 for Biden. Again, could go either way but looks good for Biden here as well.
GA: 99%+ of votes counted and it is a TIE. 49.4% for Biden, 49.4% for Trump. Biden leads currently by 1,097 votes out of 4.9 million. This one is definitely going to a recount and the margin is so tiny that it could flip either way.
PA: Order a Philly cheese steak for lunch, because the city of brotherly love may finally put an end to this long count of woe today. 95% of votes counted, and Biden has just pulled into the lead by 5,587 votes (a 0.1% margin). Unlike Georgia, this looks likely to increase further (election officials say the count should finish today) and could survive a recount. If Biden wins PA, he wins, period.
So now, with the map shown, even without calls in AZ, GA and NV, Biden has clinched the race. The next step is legal challenges and recounts. Recounts are likely because so many races are razor-thin. Wisconsin could conceivably flip due to a recount, though Biden's margin look pretty good there. Georgia is, as I said, a coin toss. Trump's strategy is to accuse the Democrats of being crafty enough to forge hundreds of thousands of fake ballots (a vote fraud on a scale unseen in US history) and then somehow forget to fill out the Senate and House races which went mostly Republican. In other words, a typical Trump big lie that his fans will lap up and others will groan at having to actually spend valuable neurons thinking about Infowars and Newsmax.
The kicker, though, is that Trump has spent the past 4 years stacking nearly every court, including the highest one in the land, so a laughably stupid conspiracy theory could just work if competently laid out and argued. Our saving grace, as always this past 4 years, may well be the Trump team's utter inability to ever approach competency in anything.
Still, I probably won't exhale until February.