Ask A Genius 573 – 80-Hour Countdown
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/31
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what’s going off the election?
Rosner: All right. So, the whole country, we’ve got 80 hours to go until the polls close in California. Then we probably have a couple of days to go until we get it clear. It is not clear at this point that we’ll have a clear picture of who won within a few hours, because right now we’re more than 90 million early ballots cast. We could get to one hundred million. By law, most states can’t count early ballots until the polls close. So, it is more complicated. You’d think that everybody getting their votes in early would mean for early counting, that the stupid laws of most states would lead to the opposite. That they can’t count anybody’s vote until the polls are closed. And all the early ballots are harder to count than the ballots cast into voting machines. So, we won’t know immediately, probably.
So, we’ve got 80 hours plus another day or two probably of anxiety and, maybe, four years of anxiety if Trump wins. But it doesn’t look like I’ve been watching the numbers, the poll aggregators, the sites, the websites, look at all the polls and rank them and adjust them for reliability and bias and come up with because looking at any one poll is not good. It is much better to look at five dozen aggregated polls. So one poll aggregator, 538.com, gives Trump a 10% chance of winning. Another aggregator, The Economist, gives Trump a 4% chance of winning. One polling company captured what people were thinking last time shows much more solid numbers for Biden this time compared to Clinton the last time.
So, we’re anxious, and there’s more reason in terms of the political climate, which is much more Nazi-ish this time around. Nobody really knew exactly how shitty Trump would turn out to be. Nobody thought the guy would be jacked up on steroids and having these super spreaders, none of this was easily predicted in 2016, when he got elected. But it has now been calculated that his rallies have caused 30 thousand or have led to 30 thousand Covid cases and 700 deaths. He’s not stopping. He’s continuing to have rallies. He’ll probably keep having rallies even after Election Day. In Texas, Kamala Harris’s the tour bus was pretty much run off the road by a 50 truck Trumper attack force, just one that forced her off the road, forced her to cancel all the rest of her Texas appearances.
And the cops refused to do anything. So, all that feels more dire than any shit that happened in 2016, the potential for more violence. We’ll have some violence over the next week or so. It won’t be nationwide. It won’t be a civil war, but there will probably be a dozen incidents of fisticuffs and, maybe, guns being brandished at polling places. So, things feel ugly. Nevertheless, the numbers give cause for optimism, 90 million early votes cast. I think I already said, which will double the number of early votes cast in 2016, which were only 47 million. Biden, has a healthy lead; I’m guessing maybe as much as 15% among the early votes, which will be roughly 60% of the votes cast this time around. Day of votes, Trump will have a healthy lead maybe out of 60 million votes cast.
Trump will have a margin of 6 to 9 million votes. But overall, you’re looking at Biden having a 7 to 11 million vote margin of victory. Unless, there’s severe fucking with the vote. But this whole next week is going to be just ugly and nervous making. You mentioned that the Trump will claim victory regardless of what the results are and most outlets this time, most legitimate news outlets this time, will exercise restraint about prematurely announcing states that have been won because the nature of vote counting this time around won’t give you immediate results. There’s just this huge potential to be wrong.
So it is like right wing sites like OAN and Breitbart, and just all these fringe right wing sites will announce that Trump won and Trump himself will announce that he’s won and that anything diverging from that is a lie. He’ll run to the courts to prevent this fraud that he says is happening. And so, all this stuff is going to play out immediately after the election. But when the dust clears, we’re all hoping, fairly optimistic, that Trump is done. He still has 77 days left as president, even if he loses. People expect him to do a bunch of horrible shit. So, anyway, that’s what we’re at now.
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