The evidence for a 'rigged' election is so preposterous as of late that it's difficult to argue that any series of reforms would have avoided this mess
You've got folks convinced that there were more votes than people in Detroit. All you have to do is do is google search 'detroit population' and 'detroit election results 2020' to learn that it's wrong
You've got folks convinced that there were fewer mail ballot requests than mail votes in Pennsylvania. A google search can disabuse you here, as well--and worst of all this was clear before the election
You've got folks convinced there's something strange about 'vote dumps'--AKA, populous jurisdictions reporting their results. If you've got an issue with it... you just have an issue with them having results...
I can keep going here. The point is that the case for 'fraud' is so bad that it's quite clear it only exists for one reason: they don't like the result. Nothing could have been done to avoid this, and that was obvious even before the '16 election--before the mail surge.
If we had an election where every state had photo ID, in-person voting, and reported all of its results at once we would be in... exactly the same place
The president of a very large country in North America said it, among others, and it's not true for registered voters either
But since many of you are too lazy to do the prescribed google searches, let me help you
None of these are Detroit, which had 49% turnout. They're not even in Michigan. They're Minnesota--google them!
Now why over 100% in Minnesota? The state has same day registration (unlike MI), so you can get more voters than pre-election registrants
I see a lot of talk about this article, and I don't think it's really worth any attention my part. I will take this as an opportunity to highlight something fairly tragic about this election: we don't really know what happened in the detail we'd like
Obviously, the election outcome is quite a bit different than in 2016--at least for the purposes of determining control of government.
But from the standpoint of the numbers, this was just not a very different election from 2016 in many of the states that matter most--like PA/WI
We're talking about, what, a ~2 pt swing nationwide and in many of the critical battleground states? Without fantastic data, it's just too small for us to decompose that modest movement in terms of turnout, changes in the composition of eligible voters, changes in attitudes, etc
Biden now leads by 3.86 points nationwide, per @Redistrict popular vote tracker, matching Obama's 3.86 pt win in 2012. He'll exceed it soon.
They won by similar amounts in very different ways. Here's the shift in presidential results between 2012 and 2020
Most of this swing occurs from 2012-2016, with relative stability between 2016 and 2020
The 2016-2020 swing is barely even worth mention on the 2012-2016 scale, at least outside of heavily Latino areas and ATL/DAL.
If we narrow the scale to tease out this cycle's subtler shifts, suburban movement stands out a bit more but still isn't always overwhelming
One interesting thing about this election is the extent that the 2016 post-mortems and subsequent arguments for how Democrats should win--by basically everyone!--don't necessarily look great in retrospect.
There were basically two major diagnoses for Clinton's win--and two main arguments for how Dems should win going forward. Neither is how Biden pulled it off
One theory was that Trump won by flipping white, working class Obama voters, and therefore Dems needed to lure them back--maybe with a populist economic pitch.
I think that explanation for Trump's win was accurate,
but Biden had very, very limited success with Obama-Trump vote
The thing that's most dispiriting about the 'vote dump' charts (which purport to show irregularities, but just show large Dem. cities reporting), is that it's in such complete bad faith that there's no way the electoral process could be reformed to guard against it going forward
Take mail voting, for instance. If you wanted to restore the credibility of the electoral process, you could eliminate no-excuse mail voting on the grounds that it's no longer credible to a wide swath of the electorate, even if you thought their concerns were completely wrong
The 'vote dumps,' OTOH, are an inevitable artifact of how jurisdiction reports their votes in batches, rather than updating their tally vote by vote. There's really nothing you can do to avoid this. Taking issue with it just means you don't believe election results, period
It was clear by 3AM or so on Election Night that we were probably headed to Biden at 306, and the 2020 gods have pulled out every stop to keep things even vaguely interesting for as long as possible
At the time, yes, I thought Biden was pretty clear favored. In retrospect, I was wrong about that—and I was against/rejected the AP call. At the time, I thought Biden would win by 40-50k in the end
One thing that's fairly unique about election analysis--and that rubs people the wrong way, I think--is the emphasis on the components of change from one election to the next
Take a football game. If a few weeks ago, Seattle loses to football game, 42-35, and then a few weeks later, Seattle beats the same team 35-28, with Wilson throwing 5 TDs, the headline is probably about Wilson throwing 5 TDs and the offense winning them the game
In electoral analysis, that's definitely not how we'd cover it. We'd say that the Seattle defense made huge strides and/or that the opponent's offense fared worse. Wilson would almost be taken as a given