Extrapolating out from current vote totals, I project Biden winning the popular vote by 4.3 percentage points and getting 81.8 million votes to President Trump’s 74.9 million, with a turnout of around 160 million. This is significant because no candidate has ever received 70 million votes in an election — former President Barack Obama came the closest in 2008, with 69.5 million votes — let alone 80 million. That may also be a slightly conservative projection, given the blue shift we’ve seen so far and the fact that late-counted votes such as provisional ballots often lean Democratic. I’d probably bet on Biden’s popular vote margin winding up at closer to 5 points than to 4, and 6 points isn’t entirely out of the question either.
The margin is also a bit more impressive in the context of our highly polarized political era, which has tended to produce close elections. If I’m right about the popular vote margin, Biden’s win would come via the second-largest popular vote margin since 2000, exceeding Obama’s 3.9-point margin against Mitt Romney in 2012 but lagging behind Obama’s 7.3-point win over John McCain in 2008.
Snippets from the WaPo editorials offices:
I have spent the past five years, four months and 23 days of my life fighting Trump — ever since he came down the garish escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential run with insults at Latino immigrants. Over that time I have written hundreds of columns — often appearing on television, too — to call attention to his awfulness. The fight against Trump was all consuming and utterly exhausting. Others have been doing far more — organizing, registering voters, marching, suing, donating, speaking out, passing legislation, producing commercials. All of us were united by a conviction that this was no mere political campaign. This was not about petty partisan differences. This was a fight to save our country.
And there were many times during the past four years when I thought the battle would be lost. Trump turned out to be even worse than I had expected: Who could have imagined that after four years of his malign and incompetent presidency nearly 240,000 Americans would be dead in a pandemic and our economy would be in ruins? And yet he did not suffer the catastrophic loss of support that he deserved.
It was enough to make me despair — to wonder if the United States was no longer the country that I had loved ever since arriving here as a 7-year-old immigrant from the Soviet Union in 1976. The rise of Trump jolted me out of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, caused me to question many of the shibboleths I advocated throughout my adult life, and even called into doubt the faith in America that had always been my secular religion.
EJ Dionne
Myths often grow out of mistaken first impressions. So it needs to be asserted unequivocally that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is far more substantial than the conventional take would have it and more revelatory about the future than Donald Trump’s election was four years ago.
The electorate decisively rejected the extremism that Trump kept on display this weekend as he continued to issue one diabolically false claim after another to discredit an election that he lost. Biden rebuilt the Democrats’ blue wall even as he extended the party’s reach in the South and Southwest.
It was, as Biden has said more colorfully in other contexts, a big deal.
But because Democrats did not win all they hoped for in the House, Senate and state legislative races, the magnitude of what happened last Tuesday is being defined down. And so many who oppose Trump simply can’t believe that more than 70 million of their fellow citizens would vote to reelect such a profoundly flawed man.
This is understandable, but it also feeds a double standard that distorts our view of the decision the country made.
Consider that in 2016, Trump won only 46 percent of the popular vote, losing it to Hillary Clinton by nearly 2.9 million ballots. He carried the three key states by minuscule margins — Michigan by 10,704, Wisconsin by 22,748 and Pennsylvania by 44,292.
Yet conservative commentators used this flimsy victory to insist that the media, liberals, academics and “coastal people” bow before the altar of “the Trump voter.” (As it happens, most Democrats, and particularly Biden, needed no lessons in empathy for working-class voters — of all races.) A thuggish Republican whose share of the vote was barely larger than John McCain’s in 2008 and smaller than Mitt Romney’s in 2012 was suddenly the prophet of a new age.
Now, look at what Biden achieved. He won the vote with 75 million ballots — more than any presidential candidate in history — and enjoys a lead of more than 4 million that is likely to grow substantially.
Biden’s margins in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are comparable to Trump’s in 2016 while his margin in Michigan is more than 10 times larger. The former vice president could win as many as 306 electoral votes, exactly Trump’s 2016 haul.
Yet there is no clamor for Republicans to get to know “the Biden voter,” no call on conservatives to be more in touch with the country they live in.
Some of this may have to do with race and racism, given who voted for Biden, and with the well-honed skill of conservative elites in mobilizing anti-elitism against liberals. But there were also pandemic-induced differences between the two elections in how results were reported and absorbed.
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There can be no denying that Trump’s ability to energize his supporters hurt Democratic House candidates who made inroads into hostile territory in 2018, as well as the party’s state legislative candidates. It turned out that it was too much to expect a miraculous resolution of the deep divisions in our politics. They go back to the 1990s, have hardened since 2000 — and Trump exploited them relentlessly.
So there’s still a lot of work to do, and Biden started doing it in an evocative and moving victory speech Saturday night that stressed healing and asked of Trump’s supporters: “Let’s give each other a chance.” Graciousness is good politics and good for the country, but so is understanding the brute facts of our political life: Democrats have won a popular vote majority in three of the last four presidential elections; Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 28 years. The country is changing in ways profoundly challenging to the GOP and the right. They’re the ones who should start worrying about being out of touch.
Right on cue, the usual narrative is emerging that "it's all about Trump and Trumpism".
Bullshit. 70 million votes in favor of "Trumpism"? Maybe the cult is going to behave more like a cult when you put a guy like Trump at its head, but the legion of morons has grown to a level of near-critical mass. It's very very very close to a self-sustaining contagion. And ain't it funny how we have a political disease at the same time as a coronavirus pandemic, and that those two things are so perfectly analogous of each other?
No - sorry - not funny at all.
Fortunately, the American transition tradition — much of it enshrined in laws such as the Presidential Transitions Improvements Act of 2015 — includes important formalities governing the transfer of power.
Unfortunately, the United States has never had a departing president like Donald J. Trump.
With at least 74 million votes cast for Biden (the most in U.S. history), Trump acts as if he isn’t going anywhere. Unlike his modern-day presidential predecessors, Trump is calling into question the democratic process by claiming an election night victory for himself.
That is a sad and startling contrast with American transition history as meticulously compiled by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition.
Case in point: A meeting between the outgoing president and the incoming president is an essential early step in the transition of power. It signals the peaceful nature of America’s democratic tradition, as the Center for Presidential Transition observed. It also is an opportunity for the president-elect to hear directly from the outgoing president about the issues that will be on the table after the presidential oath is administered.
Six days after the Nov. 4, 2008, election, President George W. Bush met with President-elect Barack Obama to brief him on several major international issues.
President Obama met with President-elect Trump right after the 2016 election. Obama brought Trump up to speed on several pressing foreign policy concerns, including the threat from North Korea. But the Obama-Trump conversation didn’t stop there. Several phone calls followed.
In addition, Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, met with Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and he went a step further.
McDonough, according to the Center for Presidential Transition, “arranged a luncheon for Priebus and 10 former chiefs of staff from every administration dating back to President Jimmy Carter.”
Because of Trump’s intransigence, no such meeting appears in the works, as of this hour.
Ed note: It's not unreasonable to assume there will be no cooperation. I think all of 45*'s "administration" is far too busy shredding evidence and burying bodies. They've spent 4 years looting the joint, so they have no time or energy left to do anything helpful to this country.Plus they've had no inclination to do anything honorable - why would they start now?
Trump needs to face the truth that governance was not given but only entrusted to him. And he blew it, big time.
Biden has already done his part by forming an early White House transition team staffed with seasoned Obama administration officials and Capitol Hill veterans under the leadership of longtime Biden adviser and former Delaware Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman. Their aim is to ensure continuity in government.
Trump’s aim is his own continuation in government.
Whether Trump likes it or not, there are transition-related legal requirements that he must observe.
Some are in place, such as an official White House Transition Coordinating Council and agency transition directors to work with the incoming team.
But more is required.
Trump’s staff must ensure that career federal executives are positioned to serve in acting capacities with succession plans during the handover phase after Trump appointees clean out their desks. The Trump team also has to provide Biden’s teams with a list of all of the politically appointed officials in the federal government, a brief description of their responsibilities, including those of senior Trump White House advisers Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro and the like. Between now and 11:59 a.m. on Jan. 20, they will have to turn in their building passes and vacate the White House premises.
Trump, despite his bitterness, has an obligation to prepare for a smooth national security handover by ensuring that Biden’s incoming national security team is completely informed about all pending intelligence and national security issues. America’s security cannot be left in limbo.
With years of White House and congressional service under his belt, Biden won’t be starting from scratch. For the sake of the nation, however, Biden deserves a chance to move through his presidential transition without having to clear hurdles and stumbling blocks placed in his way by a departing, disgruntled and defeated Donald Trump.
Taking over the presidency of the United States cannot be left to whim, capriciousness or vengeance. Our nation’s interests deserve more than that.
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