Looking back at this post, the offshore betting markets were pretty accurate going into the election, assuming Wisconsin and Michigan pull through for Biden. As polls closed, NC had moved to Trump as a small favorite. I don't think there were any upsets, with Pennsylvania and Georgia pending as possibilities.

Of course, as vote counts started coming in, the markets were all over the place and overreacted. But that's not terribly uncommon with live betting in sports, either.

Let's start with baby steps, step 1 is Trump doesn't get to be president any more. An important first step

And now a look at how much Trump overperfomed the 538 averages in swing states:

OH: +7
WI: +8
IA: +7
TX: +5
FL: +6
NC: +3
GA: +3
MN: +2
AZ: -1

A really rough night for polls and a disastrous night for certain pollsters such as Quinnipiac who showed Biden doing so much better.

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) November 4, 2020

They'll wait to see which way the wind is blowing and then a couple will issue a politely worded rebuke... maybe

SI

Looks like a 3rd party candidate is going to save Susan Collins. Unreal

And once this happens, I hope the major news outlets don't give him any attention. Let him go on Fox News, but I hope everyone else ignores him.

Another point to go along with 'this is who we are'... it doesn't look like Trump fatigue was a big factor.

For those of thus who don't care for either party, this outcome actually isn't too bad. Biden will not be able to pack the Supreme Court, add new states or abolish the Electoral College. The mid-term elections of 2022 will probably further divide the government, which is also a good thing in my opinion.

Nope. Maine has ranked choice. If Collins doesn't get 50% then the third party candidate's votes will get redistributed based on second choice.

The irony of course is that CNN's and MSNBC's ratings are probably going to take a steep hit over the next four years.

Biden just took the lead in Michigan

MI, WI, AZ, NV come in, he can sue the shit out of PA and it won't make a lick of difference.

My boss who is Irish, lives in Ireland, is all over the election this morning. He is telling me things before I even see them. :D

I am amused reading all the hot takes on this board from last night ;).

You can always tell when a certain Iowa Hawkeye fan is drunk posting :)

Based on what is trending on Twitter (I know) and this article, Fox News is out, Newsmax is in.

Conservatives Turn Against Fox News Over Election Coverage, Change Channel to Newsmax

Ah. Did not know that. Just saw the 49/44/4 spread and saw that most of the democratic areas were mostly accounted for.

Biden's going to end up winning the popular vote by 5 to 6 million. That's still a recipe for instability at some point.

Maine has Ranked Choice Voting. So the 3rd party 2nd choices will decide. And that 3rd party has asked all their voters to put Gideon as the 2nd choice.

Instability? I don't know if you've noticed, but things seem pretty fuckin' unstable right now.

It can, and will, get a lot worse than this is the majority continues to get locked out of power.

So I went to the Newsmax Twitter feed to see what they were saying. The anchors there look like they were created from a defective Karl Rove cloning machine.

SI

His final forecast had Biden winning the Electoral College 348 to 190, and winning the popular vote 53.4% to 45.4%. That doesn't look too accurate to me, even taking into consideration the uncounted votes.

Called it quits at 11:30 when I realized all the networks were spinning their wheels and we weren't getting more info.

all I would have done if I stayed up was switched from beer to vodka.

Same as Lathum. Well, sort of. Stayed up a bit later to read along with an audiobook. (I know, seems kind of silly.)

yeah, I suppose I am guilty of just looking at the final result.

The polls underestimated Trump and overestimated Biden. And that was after "correcting" for the Hillary/Trump mistakes. I don't think that anyone can doubt that. It will be interesting to see how the polls respond going forward.

538 gave Biden a 90% chance of winning (as opposed to Hillary's 66% chance) in part because the polls gave him such a large lead that there was a lot of room to absorb error. And that seems to be what will end up happening.

I think that this is Pennsylvania's last rodeo as a swing state. It is funny to think that the big 3 swing states of the Bush years (Ohio, Florida, Penn) will, I predict, all end up as heavy red leaners. The Dems better hope that NC and Georgia hurry up and get purple, because their EC disadvantage seems almost insurmountable without getting some blue leaners with high EC counts.

Not sure about 2022, but apart from the short-term violence and ugliness I expect, the current state of affairs is—for my tastes—the best I could have reasonably hoped for. Bye-bye Trump, the far right throttled by House and POTUS, and the far left throttled by Senate and SCOTUS.

One thing that's fascinating to me is that polling in presidential races appears to be getting less accurate over time. Look at the accuracy of the final polls in the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's.

Hell, now it's almost like being a weather man in south Florida. Just say there's a 50% chance of scattered showers every day, and you can always say you were right.

Biden seems to be up by 20,000 votes in Wisky right now with 97%. I'd imagine that the remaining 3% are mail in and should add to Biden's lead. Eau Claire and Lacrosse Counties at 93% in, and both are Biden counties.

I think it's entirely unclear what happens to the GOP after Trump. Is there anyone that can duplicate his magic?

It would also help quite a bit if people knew what Dems stand for. Nobody knows what Dems want to do with power.

In Michigan, Wayne County (where Detroit is) has only 70% reported and Biden is up in the state by ~12,000. That lead will grow significantly.

You know Mitch is just cackling from his crypt this morning, Bourbon in one hand: he got rid of Trump but gets to play resistance fighter for the next 4 years and keep anything from happening.

SI

Was speaking with one of the attorneys at work this AM. He is thoroughly convinced Dems are in the process of stealing the election with these "delayed" mail in counts. He's successful, has a normal wife and kids... This is how far gone a good 40% of the country are.

He also says within 2 years Kamala will 25th Amendment Biden.

Tom Cotton us their great white knight.

But they need to find a likeable Latino.

So if NV, WI and MI hold for Biden he's over the line, right? With a likely recount to come in WI, because it's 2020 and of course there will be.

The thing about cults is that they engender a shit-ton of loyalty and enthusiasm. That's what was missing from any polling. The extent to which flavor-aid drinkers would come out is obviously still not understood or maybe Trump is such an outlier in his ability to reach people at that level that polls can't take themselves to that extreme.

Your first two sentences don't matter because of what you wrote in your second two sentences.

I wonder if a non Trump generic R can get the high rural turnout or if that's specific to Trump. That's where he runs up the score.

The Dems seem to be in the business of cleaning up after republican messes these days, hard to do much when nearly ever time they are in power, the Senate throttles everything. I think they stand for environmental regulations, clean energy, and improved healthcare delivery. Whether their ideas are great, who knows, but I think it's pretty clear where their priorities are. Now of course, the republicans will get religious about the debt that they blew up (again) and most of the spending will require raising the taxes they cut, so they will be labeled as tax and spend.

With those plus AZ the other states don't matter and Biden is up 21k in WI so a recount isn't changing that outcome.

Biden is going to win. It hasn't gone anything close to script though.

Yeah, it looks like the much ridiculed Trafalgar Group is the only polling agency that nailed Wisconsin in their final poll, predicting a 0.4% Biden win.

Trafalgar was more accurate than others. I hope they get rid of polls going forward. They were off by more than 5 points in the upper midwest. Ohio and Iowa weren't close.

Georgia is really something. COBB County is going for Biden by 12% and they are only at 89% counted, meaning the rest are mail in that is likely going to increase that (for those from metro Atlanta, you will share my shock).

The big counties that are outstanding are Dekalb (80% of the vote in), Clayton (86%), Rockdale (89%), Douglas (91%), Cobb (89%), Muscogee (89%), Bibb (85%), Richmond (86%), and Chatham (80%). All are Biden counties. Biden has a very good shot to take Georgia.

People probably need to start giving Trafalgar a bit more credence.

That said, I feel so much better waking up to a Biden lead in NV, MI and WI. Please just hold serve!

I think this is where we are.

Maybe not. Biden is up by 0.6% and still about 3% to count. I can see him go over 1% based on how the mail in voting has been looking. That means no ability to do a recount.

The thing about Trafalgar is, their end numbers are closer, but their cross tabs arent overly accurate. It's like they polled for what they wanted and filled in the rest later.

I can't get over how high the enthusiasm was for him. When those early voting numbers started coming in, I thought this was a center-right mixed with all of the left and a number of non-voters coalescing behind a lukewarm centrist candidate out of fear of Trump.

There didn't seem like any avenues for Trump to grab more votes from. But Trump's went up at almost the same rate - I just didn't get it.

SI

Anyone watching FoxNews?

What's their spin right now?

Is it "we are still waiting, but Trump has a great shot?"

Or is it "Trump has won, but there are shenanigans going on and Bill Barr will need to investigate?"

I think that Fox is a great barometer of how the GOP establishment will play this. So what's their stance right now?

Yep, that's where I am. I think where we stand right now, it's really disappointing that the Senate is gone. There's a lot that goes up in smoke without it, and a lot of hopes for some changes to be made are gone. Having said that, this result is a whole, helluva lot better than trump winning. I really struggle to see just what the people who stuck with him and voted for him were thinking when they look at him. I get the whole Cult of Personality thing, and maybe that's what it is, but he will be back in 2024 and he'll begin his candidacy the moment that the result here is finalized. You thought a 2 year campaign was bad, wait until you see the four year campaign.

Just look at Miami-Dade county.

In 2016,
Clinton: 624k votes
Trump: 334k votes
Other: 13k

2020,
Biden: 617k votes
Trump: 532k votes

200k more votes and all swung for Trump.

I sure hope so. It just seems like the GOP litigious fuckery canon is loaded and ready to go, I don’t see them leaving the field without firing it at something.

Good question. Starting to stream it now...

WaPo estimating that Biden will win PA, perhaps even comfortably based on outstanding votes. Click through to see that.

Good morning! The model is on for Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Here is WI. Joe Biden has taken the lead in votes counted and the model suggests that he might keep that lead, though we need to wait until all votes have been counted.https://t.co/YWjt2VzFhO pic.twitter.com/duXaZepIDM

— Lenny Bronner (@lennybronner) November 4, 2020

Republican David Andahl, who died from COVID-19 in October, has been elected to the North Dakota House of Representatives

— BNO News (@BNONews) November 4, 2020

Anyone want to give the analysis on this one?:lol:

Right now the anchors on Fox are playing it pretty straight down the middle, explaining the "red mirage, blue shift" concept and specifically mentioned that the same-day votes were counted first and the mail-ins are being counted now. Anyone watching this at least is being given the basic facts. They did, however, read this Trump tweet:

Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020

Pinnacle, the sharpest offshore book with some of the highest limits, now has the betting line at Biden -450 Trump +354. Factoring in the vigorish, that translates into implied odds of Biden 79% Trump 21%.

(In fairness to the Fox anchors, the President of the United States tweeting that out IS news...)

I think one of the major networks will call it soon-ish.

I find it odd that if you vote and die prior to votes being counted your vote can be thrown out, but votes for you aren't.

He's got great staying power!

They just interviewed John Fetterman, the Democrat Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania. He explained that even though Trump currently has about a 500,000 vote lead, the approximately 1.5 million outstanding ballots that haven't been counted are from predominantly Democrat areas, and that it's very likely that Biden will win the state.

Trafalgar is garbage. They had three polls were the breakdowns for gender, education, and race were exactly the same down to one-hundredth of a percentage. They were clearly just making things up.

Something about Hillary Clinton and getting to the bottom of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation ASAP.

Fox calls it for Biden and we all die in a dimensional paradox.

It's a dead issue.

The pundit they have on now just said "he did not win these states last night." Also said "we must count VALID ballots only." So....they're providing legit information and also a little something for the faithful to hang on to.

In South Florida, the USPS failed to deliver ~27 percent of the mail ballots.

— Liam Martin (@LiamWBZ) November 4, 2020

More so than the final ABC News/Washington Post poll that had Biden winning Wisconsin by 17 points?

That is well done.

You would think that a group raised on D20 would understand how often a natural 20 is rolled. More to that, a 15 or a 12. Yeah, I didn't get that 20, but I still saved, but it was way closer than it should have been. It's like saying everyone said I was guaranteed to save no problem, but now that I just barely did it, I'm mad that they weren't right enough.

Hard agree. The biggest thing I have been wrong about is that there was a limit to Trump's base. I've stated countless times that Trump has his base, and its frighteningly large, but that Fox's fearmongering and Trumpism in general can only elevate so high... even questioning if the additional fearmongering of recent months could even possibly do anything to attract more support from the right, and that all this election was about is whether or not the left could care enough to come together to overwhelm those numbers and get him out.

In those statements is a clear belief that Trump's base is shockingly and saddeningly large, but limited in size and already at capacity, and we still have a large majority that is available to stand against that and say NO. On that, I was wrong. I have not yet begun to process what that means as far as my perception of human decency and humanity. I think I'm going to struggle to do that when the time comes, if I'm honest, in a somewhat dark and very real way.

No time for that right now though.

In other election news: NJ, Arizona, and South Dakota, and Montana voted to allow recreational marijuana. Mississippi legalized medical marijuana. Oregon voted to decriminalize possession for just about every drug. Mississippi also has a new state flag.

I'm very interested to see how that works out for Oregon.

Tales from the Trump bubble - I don't talk politics with my parents but my brother does. He got a text this morning from my dad that said "That did not go as I thought it would." They were convinced it would be a Trump landslide.

Twitter fact checking Trump left and right today. Right thing to do, but it ain’t exactly gonna calm things down either...

There's a massive contingent who want an authoritarian leader who will 'make things right'. It's practically what he runs on. It's the sort of leader people like Jon have been pining for, for years. That undercurrent is more frightening than anything. Even if it's not trump that pulls it this time, someone else is getting ready. You see it in the "Q" nonsense, and the reaction to this, and the hopes for their own liberation from the 'enemy' it's all over. We are nowhere near out of the woods as a country, even without trump in the white house.

I heard a bit and it was more "We need to wait and see but Trump is in a good spot"

Their morning show isn't as horrific as the rest. I'm sure Hannity, Carlson, etc...will be throwing raw meaty to their bases tonight screaming about fraud.

This is me, too, in a lot of ways.

SI

:+1:

Hannity is gonna Hannity.

But it is, IMO, a good sign for stability that FoxNews right now is playing it straight.

One thing to keep in mind, Hannity and Carlson aren't journalists, they're entertainers. For the most part, I think Fox's news branch did a pretty good job with their election night coverage. They were the first network to call Virginia and Arizona for Biden.

I watched about 2 hours of Fox last night and it wasn't anything like I thought it would be. They were doing well staying in the middle. A couple of the folks on there for their opinions were definitely Trump leaning, but overall they were fairly objective.

Vegas Vic, that is a good point on those 2 clowns.

I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that to a lot of people in the middle, politics is not life or death. There are a ton of 1 or 2 issue voters that are NOT abortion voters that really don't care about the rest of the stuff, nor do they believe Dems when they scream about people's rights being taken away, or it being the end of the world or the rise of fascism or whatever. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant.

I guess what I'm saying is, we could dial back the hystericalness a tad.

Also, my friends who are disappointed today that Biden didn't win by enough...

A win is a win. Let's all go read from the Book of Dabo... Swinney, yes. "It's really hard to win. So we're gonna celebrate every win."

Also "The goal is to win, period. I don’t want to ever be a program — ever — that doesn’t appreciate winning.

“Just look around college football, there’s a lot of people that would love to have the program that we have here, I can tell you that. 12-0 ain’t good enough? Then it’s time for me to seek other places. Make sure you get that."

A WIN IS A WIN.

Apparently it was amusing when Fox called AZ for Biden. The pundits were like are you sure to the data desk and the data desk was like, YES, WE ARE SURE. Over and over again.

I am well aware of the official status of the FOX News opinion shows, the problem is a HUGE number of gullible Americans are not aware of it and take their nonsense as gospel.

What does the Democratic Party do with the fact that Trump won the highest percentage of non-white vote for GOP since 1960? And it also kinda blows back against the whole "anti-minority" tag on Trump. Apparently - despite all evidence he provides out of his mouth - he has struck a chord with a lot of minorities.

Need to see the gender breakdowns to make any conclusions but I'm fairly certain it's going to break heavily toward males. Some people want that strong authoritarian figure to feed their machismo.

I was switching back and forth and saw this. The reason they double checked was no other network was willing to call it and the Trump team at the white house was peppering social media with how wrong they were. It wasn't like 2-3 pundits were like "that can't be right, check it again". They were basically under siege on social media from the right.

I'm pretty sure if MSNBC called FL for Trump early in the night, a similar thing would have happened. People were so rabid last night that if "their side" did anything construed as helping the other side, they lost their minds.

We all laughed at the rapper endorsements but they may have paid off.

I imagine Dabo would say something like "We can give you campaign contributions, we can give you internal pollsters, we can give you ads from political PACs, but we can't give you guts! This election was about BYOG, bring your own guts!"

Dabo Swinney: A BYOG "Bring Your Own Guts" Game in Win Over Notre Dame - YouTube

trump would have killed as the President of Mexico. Some would argue that he killed as the POTUS, but those people might have only have had the flu.

Yeah, my issue isn't with people saying there was a 89% chance and then Biden nearly lost. There always was an 11% chance he could lose. My issue was with their process on the states.

It's like saying the Patriots will kill the Rams in the Super Bowl because their pass D will shut them down and the Pats will run for 200 yards. Then, the game ends and the Pats have run for 10 total yards and win a 35-31 passing shootout. Their pick may have been "right", but the reasoning was a complete disaster.

So is AZ back in play?

I don't think so. Trump has narrowed the lead there and they percentage reported was off, but Maricopa has outstanding votes that should go to Biden.

If I'm a Republican strategist who doesn't care about anything else, I'm all in on Trumpism. I view this as positively as a loss can be viewed and I'm more bullish on the future of the party than I have been since at a minimum 2004.

I see an incompetent blowhard who might have just become modern America's most successful one-term president from the political side. There's never been a better example of media bias to trumpet than this just-completed election. What previous Republican presidents failed to accomplish in terms of addressing the party expanding demographically by more sensible and traditional methods, Trump achieved. Turning away from that now would just alienate a whole raft of voters.

Going forward then, you hammer home the idea that if everything didn't conspire against him, Trump would have won. Despite all of his flaws, he connected. Protests against his election in '16 starting the day after by people who didn't even vote. Calls for impeachment before his inauguration and eventual impeachment proceedings on charges most people couldn't understand much less care about - there was never any silver bullet. The least support from his party's establishment and worst media coverage of any modern president by several orders of magnitude, pandemic, recession, and still he almost won.

Viewing Biden as a one-term target in 2024, you're looking for Trump Lite - somebody who is brash, takes no prisoners, in your face on the offense all the time, shunning irrelevancies like dignity of the office and traditional norms, but somebody who also knows how to park it when necessary. This kind of candidate could consolidate and retain these gains, and win in almost any other political environment. You don't have to worry about the federal judiciary moving back in the wrong direction - the Senate will ensure the best Biden can do is replace liberals with moderates. Help them if they want to nominate a SCOTUS justice anytime after the '22 midterms.

People like Bush, Rubio, nevermind Kasich etc. are the party's past. Going forward anyone more traditional or mainstream than Cruz is too weak to be your standard-bearer. Isolationism, strong borders, fighting back against the ivy tower know-nothing elites that constantly spit on the values of ordinary Americans and whose propaganda drumbeat only barely was enough to get Biden in office, keep the socialists out, etc.

These will all of course be exaggerated to the nines, but there are elements of truth in all of them to sell to independents when you remove the unnecessary negatives of a candidate like Trump. If I'm a purely politically-oriented strategist, I look at this situation and I see a winning Republican future.

I generally agree. This loss has enough silver linings for the GOP that they can definitely formulate a path forward. The GOP becoming the party of black males would be one of the strangest occurances in a historically strange year though.

Also of interest vis a vis the Senate, James leading Peters by 20k votes in Michigan, which means he's running 50k votes ahead of Trump. The votes remaining probably give Peters just enough ... but it's far from certain.