Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

Building on Lee’s post about how Sanders might have done in a general election against Trump, I recently conducted a national survey of Americans over 30, whom I have been tracking for 12 years. Ninety-two percent of respondents would have stuck with the same party regardless of the Democrats’ nominee, but 4 percent who were with Biden then said “neither” when asked to choose between Trump and Sanders — and another 1 percent backed Biden and then Trump. By contrast, just 1 percent backed Sanders but not Biden. So Biden does seem to hold onto a sliver of voters who said they wouldn’t back Sanders.

There are reports that machines were down in Scranton, Pennsylvania earlier today, prompting a judge to order polling places stay open later. There have been some tweets circulating that made this out to be suspicious, but these kinds of malfunctions happen. To be clear, the machines that had problems were optical scanners, into which voters insert their hand-marked paper ballots for tabulation. As Eddie Perez, an election technology expert, explained in a tweet thread, these devices are built with an emergency slot to store ballots for later tabulation in the event they break down because, well, it happens!

In response to Clare’s comments about the unexpected nature of this campaign, the pandemic has obviously changed pretty much everything — the state of the country, the economy, and the focus of the race. I wonder how the claim that “democracy itself is on the ballot” would have played out under more normal circumstances. But the distinctions between the two parties are fairly clear on a lot of key issues, which I think actually makes it harder to define key messages and issues in a particular race.