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

In case people are wondering what the Trump campaign is saying right now … they’re saying they’re more confident than they were in 2016! Which could well be true. In 2016, it was reported that the Trump campaign didn’t really expect to win at all. While this is certainly spin, I also find it pretty believable that many on the Trump team are in a different mindset this election night: They know that it’s going to be a high-turnout election, they know that there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the ultimate fate of some mail-in ballots in some states, etc. While Trump is clearly the underdog in this race, it makes sense that the Trump operation’s self-conception has evolved over the course of four years.

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!