A legitimate and narrow win for President-elect Biden.
A legitimate and narrow win for President-elect Biden.
I n 2016, Donald Trump’s majority in the Electoral College came down to 77,744 votes spread across three states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
His margin of victory in each state:
Michigan: 10,704 votes
Wisconsin: 22,748 votes
Pennsylvania: 44,292 votes
If Trump had lost those three states, he would have lost the Electoral College to Hillary Clinton.
On Saturday, more than 24 hours after Decision Desk HQ called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, major news outlets were able to do the same: Biden now leads Trump by more than 37,000 votes in Pennsylvania — about 0.6 percent of the total vote — but that lead is expected to grow as the remaining uncounted votes are added to the tally.
Calling Pennsylvania was enough for the networks to declare that Biden had a lock on more than 270 electoral votes needed to become the next president of the United States.
But if you look at which states really put Biden over the top in 2020 — the same way Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania put Trump over the top in 2016 — it appears likely that Biden’s majority in the Electoral College will depend on fewer than 77,000 individual voters.
In Wisconsin, Biden leads Trump by 20,558 votes (all precincts have reported their vote count).
In Georgia, Biden leads Trump by 7,547 votes (almost all votes have been counted, but the secretary of state said yesterday a recount was expected when the margin was somewhat closer).
In Arizona, Biden leads Trump by 21,188 votes, but that could shrink as more votes are counted, and it’s not yet out of the realm of possibility that Biden could lose Arizona despite early calls to the contrary.
Even with Pennsylvania firmly in his column, it appears the election would have ended in an Electoral College tie if Biden had lost Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. (I write “appears” because North Carolina, where Trump leads by 76,000 votes, won’t report some final absentee ballots until November 12. If Biden unexpectedly pulls ahead, that would change the analysis about how many votes in how many states tipped the Electoral College to Joe Biden.)
See that hypothetical scenario below:
According to the Constitution, an Electoral College tie would send the election to the House, where each state delegation gets one vote. Republicans will maintain their control of a majority of state delegations in the House, so an Electoral College tie in 2020 would have led to Trump’s reelection.
So, it appears very likely that a majority for Biden in the Electoral College in 2020 will depend on fewer than the 77,000 individual American voters who really decided the 2016 election.
That tight margin does not call into question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. There are no reports of widespread voter fraud or election fraud — nothing that could come close to changing the outcome of the election — and Biden’s 2020 victory will be just as legitimate as Trump’s 2016 victory.
It’s worth recalling that for all of Hillary Clinton’s grumbling over the last four years, she conceded the morning after the election (the votes were obviously counted more quickly in 2016.)
Clinton herself didn’t call for any recounts that had no chance of changing the outcome of the election. Green Party candidate Jill Stein did successfully get a recount in Wisconsin, during which Donald Trump gained 131 votes. (The difference between the first official vote count and the final vote tally after a recount is fewer than 300 votes on average.) As former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker pointed out, in quite an understatement, overcoming a 20,000-vote deficit in a recount is a “high hurdle.”
Some Democrats will point out that Biden is on track to win the national popular vote by at least four percentage points as proof of his “mandate” to pursue a progressive agenda. But the popular vote isn’t how the president is elected, it is not how presidential candidates compete now, and the Electoral College will not be abolished before the 2024 presidential election.
Biden is free to pursue whatever agenda he wants, just as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and every other president were free to pursue whatever agenda they wanted. But talk of how much of a “mandate” the victor of a presidential election has is just that — talk. How far left a Biden presidency will be able to push America over the next two years will depend a lot on whether Democrats win two runoff Senate elections in Georgia on January 5 and achieve a 51-50 majority in the Senate (i.e. an evenly divided Senate with a Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker).
How far left they will want to push the country will also depend on how concerned Democrats are about losing Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. If Democrats want to understand just how close-run of a thing the 2020 presidential election was, they should (in all likelihood) look at the final vote tallies in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia and see that it came down to a fraction of one percentage point of the vote in a few key places.