After a long couple of years of campaigning, we’re finally here: Election Day 2020. It’s been a schlep, but we’re about to find out who will be inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20, 2021… or are we?
With mail-in voting becoming one of, if not the, most viable options due to the continued COVID-19 pandemic, Election Day doesn’t look the same as it has in years past. Often people would take off a few hours during the workday in the weeks prior to an election to stand in long lines waiting to cast their ballots. This is still happening with social distancing, of course, but many Americans are preferring to just mail in their ballots instead. Because of this, crucial swing states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina have extended their deadlines for mail-in ballots to be received.
Don’t be surprised if we don’t find out who the winner is on Election Night. Even if one campaign declares victory, there’s a good chance the other won’t concede right away.
Nearly every national poll coming in to election day has shown Vice President Biden leading President Trump by a margin of anywhere between three and 11 points. However, after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, everyone’s waiting to count their chickens before they’ve hatched. With his win over Hillary Clinton, the credibility of polling came into serious question. If Trump is able to pull this off again, pollsters might as well pack up their bags and find a new career.
Though a Trump win is not unheard of, it’s not seen as likely either. In the end, it will likely all come down to 8 swing states, all of which Trump carried in 2016 and all but one of which were decided by a margin of between less than 1-6%.
The only outlier here is Ohio, which Trump won by over 8%. It’s worth noting that no Republican president has won without the Buckeye State and it hasn’t voted against the eventual presidential winner since 1960.
But it’s 2020, anything can happen.
With each state here representing 10 or more electoral college votes, it’s pretty obvious how crucial they are for each candidate to secure. For Joe Biden, he has a pretty wide path to victory, and in order to pass the 270 electoral vote threshold, all he needs is to secure a combination of two to four battleground states. For Donald Trump, however, he has a much narrower path in that he needs to notch at least six battleground states to win re-election.
Either of these scenarios are entirely possible. One very plausible, though unlikely outcome is that the country is so divided that the electoral map produces a 269-269 tie.
Though this map seems just too, too nice and clean, there have been two times in American History when no candidate has captured the majority of the electoral college vote: in 1800 and 1824. This would lead to a contingent election where the incoming House of Representatives elects the President and the incoming Senate elects the Vice President.
Ultimately, out of all the swing states, all eyes are on Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2016, Trump carried Pennsylvania, breaking the so-called “Blue Wall” that Democrats were so reliant on, by getting much-needed voter swings from Democrat to Republican in Erie, Lackawanna, Luzerne, and Northampton counties. While Obama carried all four counties in 2012 to win the state, Trump nabbed three of them in 2016, and cut into the Democrats’ margin of victory in Lackawanna from 26,000 for Obama to 3,500 for Clinton. The end result was Trump winning the state by over 44,000 votes.
Arizona, on the other hand, hadn’t gone in the Democratic win column since Bill Clinton in 1996. In 2016, Trump won the state over Hillary by more than 91,000 votes. But from the 2016 presidential election to the 2018 Senate election, the numbers have shifted dramatically in the Democrats’ favor, where Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeated Republican Martha McSally by more than 55,000 votes. Maricopa County, in particular, went from +44,000 net votes for Trump in 2016 to +60,000 net votes for Sinema in 2018, a swing of more than 104,000 votes.
While gearing up to watch the Super Bowl of politics, be prepared for a long night filled with routine hyperbole, county names no one has heard of, wild speculation and declaration, and, most importantly, delicious meltdowns. Should be a good time.
