It's coming into focus now. Even the slim GA lead will be outside the territory where a recount offers much chance of flipping, and AZ's latest batch of votes was not what Trump needed. At the end of the day, Biden will win 306 electoral votes with a popular vote margin of 4-4.5%. A pretty substantial victory all told.
Funny really, as the BBC (and other media outlets) have really been jamming home how it was so close, but in reality it is starting to shape up as a reasonably substantial win by presidential election standards. (Have my fingers crossed, as it isn't mathematically impossible Trump could win yet, but very very unlikely now you would think). The counting procedure has merely created the illusion of it being a knife edge election, by leaving mail in ballots until last. That isn't to say Trump hasn't had a disappointingly strong performance, but in the end it doesn't look as close as we have been led to believe.
Biden has taken back the blue wall. Here’s hoping that bodes well for Labour’s chances of taking back the red wall in 5 years time. I think it’s a similar demographic, former industrial towns, and communities that once had a strong Trade Union culture? A question still remains though imo; if the Unions once politicised working communities in industrial towns, now that those industries and Unions are largely gone, what values do those communities rally round, and how do they pursue their interests politically?
Also, the electoral college. The margins in several of the states is pretty thin. If you look at the popular vote or the final electoral totals, it looks like an easy win. But if you look at how little Biden is going to win in GA, WI, and AZ (if he even wins) it was a thinnest of victories.
Here's Bernie Sanders predicting exactly how Trump would respond to later mail in votes being counted a few weeks ago. He got it spot on... Starts at 3 minutes...
Polls in some states were badly wrong. Polls in the Senate/House races were actually worse. In the end, 538's election model based on the polling will be off by about 3.5%, having called 50 of 53 races correctly (50 states + DC + Maine's 2nd Congressional District + Nebraska's 2nd). It's not a good performance for pollsters, but the question that needs to be asked going forward is less about secret Trump support, and more about latent GOP support. If Trump got the percentage of the vote that other GOP candidates did, he'd have been reelected.
