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K asked me this question last night.
It's hard to say until we have all the results. And -- Biden did get millions more votes than Trump got, a result that is obscured by the ongoing Electoral College drama. Biden did better against Trump than Hillary, and he probably won, beating an incumbent President for the first time since 1992. Beating an incumbent President is no easy feat!
A hypothesis to look at, that may explain why the results diverged from expectations:
Although voter turnout this year broke records going back over 100 years, people who do not fear COVID-19 were more likely to vote than people who do fear COVID-19. And people who do not fear COVID-19 are much more likely to vote Republican. (And voting by mail is more subject to screwing up than voting in person.)
So it is possible the pandemic affected turnout in ways that were impossible to predict accurately beforehand, because we've never had a pandemic during an election before, we've never been able to measure how fear of contagion might polarize along partisan lines, and also pump up in-person turnout for one party.
But another hypothesis:
Is that having Trump on the ballot is just different, that Trump appeals to people in ways that cannot be modeled or weighted appropriately by pollsters. We've never had a politician like him before. He stokes turnout among his supporters, and among those who hate him, but he stokes turnout among his supporters even more. They love him even more than we hate him. Because he's shamelessly willing to play their inner asshole on TV and Twitter, in front of all to see. Trump does their asshole for them. He's all their inner assholes, wishing they felt free to say whatever the fuck they want to say, like he does.
-----
It's hard to test either of these hypotheses in real time. It may be Republicans won their dice rolls twice in a row, and that's all there is to it. Polling is often a few points off, that's why there's a "margin of error" -- though everybody ignores it.
Or it may be that voting actually matters. The only way to know the future is to vote, and then to count the votes. Ignore the polls, and vote. There is no "blue wave", there is no "red wave", there's only you, making your own decision.
It's hard to say until we have all the results. And -- Biden did get millions more votes than Trump got, a result that is obscured by the ongoing Electoral College drama. Biden did better against Trump than Hillary, and he probably won, beating an incumbent President for the first time since 1992. Beating an incumbent President is no easy feat!
A hypothesis to look at, that may explain why the results diverged from expectations:
Although voter turnout this year broke records going back over 100 years, people who do not fear COVID-19 were more likely to vote than people who do fear COVID-19. And people who do not fear COVID-19 are much more likely to vote Republican. (And voting by mail is more subject to screwing up than voting in person.)
So it is possible the pandemic affected turnout in ways that were impossible to predict accurately beforehand, because we've never had a pandemic during an election before, we've never been able to measure how fear of contagion might polarize along partisan lines, and also pump up in-person turnout for one party.
But another hypothesis:
Is that having Trump on the ballot is just different, that Trump appeals to people in ways that cannot be modeled or weighted appropriately by pollsters. We've never had a politician like him before. He stokes turnout among his supporters, and among those who hate him, but he stokes turnout among his supporters even more. They love him even more than we hate him. Because he's shamelessly willing to play their inner asshole on TV and Twitter, in front of all to see. Trump does their asshole for them. He's all their inner assholes, wishing they felt free to say whatever the fuck they want to say, like he does.
-----
It's hard to test either of these hypotheses in real time. It may be Republicans won their dice rolls twice in a row, and that's all there is to it. Polling is often a few points off, that's why there's a "margin of error" -- though everybody ignores it.
Or it may be that voting actually matters. The only way to know the future is to vote, and then to count the votes. Ignore the polls, and vote. There is no "blue wave", there is no "red wave", there's only you, making your own decision.