On an unusually cold and wet night in Austin, Texas, 20 years ago, the Republican power-brokers gathered in the Four Seasons to party their way to victory.
The TV networks called the race and the presidency for George W Bush, then yanked it all back. The party fizzled out as the Bush entourage descended into frowns and finger-pointing.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it, but that initial call for Bush was a concrete weight around the neck of their Democratic rivals for the next month, through the agony of the Florida recount.
The Biden campaign – including several people who fought in Florida two decades ago – are not making the same mistakes as the Al Gore campaign.
For several weeks, the Gore team struggled to push back against Bush’s presumption of victory, as they argued in court for a recount of the slender 537-vote margin of victory. Meanwhile, the Bush team insisted that their rivals were trying to overturn a result that was not, in fact, final.
Joe Biden tried to stop that train before it left the station on election night.
“We feel good about where we are. We really do. I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election,” Biden told supporters in Wilmington, Delaware, after midnight on election night. “We’re going to have to be patient until the hard work of tallying the votes is finished. And it ain’t over until every vote is counted.”
“As I’ve said all along it’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to say who won this election.”
For the next few days, the 2020 election might feel like it’s 2000 all over again. But it’s not. There may well be multiple legal disputes, as Donald Trump has suggested. However, it is hard to stop counting ballots that have yet to be counted. Recounts are entirely different from first counts, even when the US supreme court is tilted heavily against Democrats.
Then there is the X-factor of the Trump team’s sheer incompetence. The Bush campaign assembled a crack team of lawyers – including two lawyers who would later become Trump’s supreme court justices – but nobody is expecting Trump to gather anything like the same legal firepower.
Many people expected Trump poll-watchers across the US to intimidate Democrats from voting. The poll-watchers never materialized.
This, after all, is a president who confuses the poor people of Poland with the places where people vote.
“We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the election,” he tweeted in the early hours of Wednesday morning. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed.”
We should never forget Poland, as Bush told us. We should also never forget that every state counts its votes after the polls close, and that Trump has told us for weeks that he would try to challenge vote-counting if he fell behind.
In reality, the best Republican election lawyers have already made their positions clear about Trump’s efforts to stop vote-counting. Ben Ginsberg, who led the party’s election law arguments for decades, called Trump’s approach earlier this week “as un-American as it gets”.
“It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority,” he wrote in The Washington Post.
Never mind the permanent minority. What about this one?
Many Democrats dreamed of a result that would be clear within hours of the polls closing on Tuesday night. Anything short of a crushing, immediate defeat for Trump would fall short of those dreams.
But with vast numbers of early votes and mail-in ballots, in the middle of a historic pandemic, there was no chance that election night would unfold like all the others since 2000.
When the final results of the 2020 cycle are confirmed, there is still plenty of room for a decisive victory for Joe Biden. Suburban voters tilted heavily away from Trump compared with four years ago. They shifted across states that remained Republican and Democratic, as well as the states that have not yet finished counting votes.
Joe Biden could be heading for a final victory with the same kind of margins that Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012 in the popular vote. Nobody called that a narrow result in an evenly-divided nation.
But he could also be heading for a US Senate that is still in Republican hands, which means his ability to get anything done is severely curtailed. In that case, a yawning chasm will open between Democratic hopes for a Biden presidency and the reality of a deadlocked government.
How could states such as Florida and Texas not switch sides, as Arizona seems to have done? How is it not obvious how much of a disaster the Trump presidency is with 220,000 dead Americans in this pandemic?
In part, because those states were always toss-ups, well within the margin of error. The final polls in Texas suggested Trump was ahead by one point while the final average in Florida placed Biden ahead by two points.
Yet the unchanged nature of the electoral map also points to another elephant-sized factor. The megaphone of the presidency is a powerful thing, and Trump’s ability to inject disinformation into the media’s bloodstream is even more impactful than foreign interference or social media in this cycle.
The 2020 election is far from over. Two years ago, Democrats went to bed on election night believing that there was no blue wave. The next day, they found they had won the House of Representatives and the Trump presidency was changed for ever.
“Keep the faith guys,” Biden said in the middle of a long election night. “We’re going to win this.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
