Joe Biden Won the Election by Fewer than 50,000 Votes
Sen. Bernie Sanders Predicts How Trump Will React On Election Night www.youtube.com
The president's rhetoric—deriding mail-in voting and downplaying the threat of the deadly coronavirus pandemic—meant that his supporters were much more likely to turn out to polling places. Democratic voters, on the other hand, were more inclined to avoid the crowded public spaces of election day voting.
Considering the ongoing, unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases in the US, that caution was well-placed. Nonetheless, it gave President Trump leeway to pretend that his apparent victory had somehow been tampered with.
That strategy may turn out to work, and Donald Trump could snatch a "legal" coup from the jaws of a clear electoral defeat. But if the election had been closer, this game would have been much easier for him to play. The uncertainty and the potential for a court case to disrupt the results—as happened in Florida in the 2000 election—could have taken over the country for weeks without any projected winner.
Instead, victory was declared for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and we got to experience the pristine beauty of Donald Trump's desperate legal team scrambling to give a press conference outside Philadelphia's Four Seasons…Total Landscaping.
The image of Rudy Giuliani spreading lies about fraudulent votes in front of a garage door in a random, grungy parking lot was priceless. The only thing better is the way he and his team unconvincingly pretended to have booked that spot—rather than the similarly-named luxury hotel—on purpose.
I could write jokes for 800 years and I'd never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for… https://t.co/HoNzSpDrlt— Zack Bornstein (@Zack Bornstein)1604804994.0
And that absurd, hilarious fumbling is all thanks to the fact that Joe Biden earned a resounding and unambiguous victory. Except… Did he?
The Election Results
At current count Joe Biden has received around 5 million more votes than Donald Trump, and that margin is likely to grow as millions of remaining votes are tallied.
His popular vote lead puts him roughly in line with Barack Obama's unequivocal defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Biden is also projected to win as many as 306 electoral college votes—the same number Donald Trump won in 2016, and well in excess of the 270 needed to secure the presidency.
While these figures fall short of most of the polling in the lead-up to the election—which predicted Biden securing closer to an 8% lead—it still sounds like a decisive result. Sadly that shortfall hurt down-ballot Democrats, who failed to take control of the Senate or strengthen their caucus in the House. That points to at least two years of divided, ineffectual governance while Americans face down multiple generation-defining crises.
Still, the fears of a Trump victory that loomed large as the first results came in now seem a little silly. Trump didn't really stand a chance, right?
I woke up this morning with a sense of dread that I can't shake. So I'm gonna put my doom spiral out there in hopes… https://t.co/nTkVxyJVbt— Natalie Wynn (@Natalie Wynn)1604988024.0
Sadly, no. While the number of Americans who turned out to reject Trump's hateful politics and failures of leadership outnumber their pro-Trump counterparts by a respectable margin, the growing sense that Biden's victory was inevitable and comfortable does not hold up to scrutiny.
As 2016 taught us, "millions more votes" is a meaningless achievement in our bizarre, antiquated system. In that presidential race Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but the way electoral votes are apportioned to favor rural states resulted in Donald Trump winning 306 electoral votes and the presidency (later finalized as 304 due to faithless electors).
The Decisive States
At the time, a great deal of attention was paid to the fact that three states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—had narrowly handed Trump his win. Worth a total of 46 electoral votes (enough to flip the whole election), Trump's margin of victory in those states was less than 1%.
From a cohort of 138 million, 79,316 voters in those three states ended up making the decision for the entire country. It seemed like a slap in the face to the notion of Democratic elections. But it turns out that things were even more narrow in 2020.
While there are still votes being counted—and the specific figures could change as the final tallies come in—it looks likely that four states will go to Biden with a margin of less than 1%. And in the three states where counts are currently closest—Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—Biden is ahead by a total of fewer than 50,000 votes.
If those three states had gone the other way—Arizona could still flip—Donald Trump would have secured their 37 electoral votes and been handed a second term as president. And that's exactly what would have happened if 0.03% of the 160 million Americans who voted had decided to stay home—or if half that number flipped to voting for Trump instead of Biden.
Projected final Electoral College Tally, with current vote counts in the four closest states.AP
And Donald Trump only needs to assemble enough flimsy evidence to cast substantial doubt on that tiny fraction of votes in order to conduct a coup.
To put things in perspective, the voters who ensured Joe Biden's victory are outnumbered by the average daily visitors to Disneyland (pre-COVID). Back in the '90s, all the voters who were decisive in expelling Trump from the White House could have fit inside Donald Trump's Atlantic City casinos—before those were all either shuttered or rebranded.
The number of voters who determined our leader during a pandemic are dwarfed by the number of people who have been killed by that pandemic in New York and Texas alone...
Even if you add Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes to the mix, around 95,000 voters could have delivered Donald Trump a comfortable victory—with 292 electoral votes—just by staying home. Then they all could have gone to a game at Penn State's Beaver Stadium, with 10,000 seats left to spare.
The Problem With the Electoral College
Why is it possible—let alone familiar and expected—for the most powerful position on Earth, leading a nation of 330 million, to be assigned according to the will of a number of people who couldn't fill the seats at a college football game?
Our system, as it currently exists, makes these razor-thin margins unavoidable.
If the decision were between two disappointing moderates, that might not be such a terrifying prospect, but political polarization has made each election an inevitable battle between a far-right zealot and… a disappointing moderate.
States with more rural populations lean strongly Republican, while more urban states lean strongly Democratic. With the already swift rate of cultural progress in cities being amplified by the Internet's tendency to intensify everything, the backlash in rural areas that are more resistant to change is stark, and the divide is only growing.
Of course the populous in Democratic states significantly outnumber Republican states. In a democratic system that would mean that Republicans would have to shift their policies and their rhetoric to appeal to more people. But the electoral college cancels out the population difference—giving smaller states proportionally more sway.
As a result, Republicans can play more and more to their relatively small base of support, while Democrats attempt to build broad enough support to overcome their disadvantage. And this struggle ends up playing out in just a handful of "swing states" where opinions are fairly mixed.
That's where candidates spend hundreds of millions of dollars, bombarding residents with attack ads, trying to sway the slim percentage of voters who aren't devoted to one side or the other. And the effect is to leave an increasing number of people disgusted with the whole political process.
This makes it exceedingly easy for misinformation or voter suppression efforts to become decisive. What if Trump donor Louis DeJoy had been even better at slowing down the mail in the lead up to the election? What if a "satirical" deepfake video of Hunter Biden had spread on Facebook, bolstering false claims of pedophilia? Would it have been enough to shift the vote by 1% in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin?
In either case, as awful and as stressful as this election was, we shouldn't take the less-than-horrifying result as a sign that things are okay, or that the next election will be any better. As a nation we walk on a political knife's edge that's controlled by a fraction of the population of a few states.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: A Possible Solution
If you don't live in one of those battleground states, you will never be in that tiny group of voters whose decision to vote or stay home determines the next four years for the rest of America. As long as we continue to allow the confusing, undemocratic, and unpopular Electoral College system to determine the outcome of presidential elections, candidates will ignore the needs of your state, because your vote won't count.
The good news is: There is a way out that doesn't avoids the nearly impossible process of passing a constitutional amendment.
The Electoral College and the National Popular Vote | One Detroit Clip www.youtube.com
States have the power to determine how their electoral votes are awarded. If a few more state legislatures in places like Texas—where each vote has roughly ⅓ the power of a vote in Vermont—signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, we could render the Electoral college moot.
A winning number of electoral votes would go to whoever won the popular vote. Our next president would be determined by millions of Americans, rather than a few thousand people in Wisconsin.
Until then, we will keep walking the razor's edge.
So You Moved Back in with Your Parents During Quarantine: A Field Guide
So you moved back in with your parents, huh? If it makes you feel any better, as of July 2020, 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of monthly Census Bureau data.
Pew Research Center
If you're like me, you may find that information alternately depressing or comforting, depending on the day. That means that more than half of people your age are also kickin' it in their childhood bedroom or musty suburban basement.
Like you, I also crash landed at my parents' home when the pandemic started to look really dire. While I was lucky enough to keep my job (now working remotely, of course), I just couldn't justify continuing to pay for my expensive Brooklyn apartment when all the things I loved about living in Brooklyn were no longer available. So here I am, squandering my youth in my parents' spare bedroom in Virginia.
But hey! At least I'm using this time to improve myself! I'm getting into yoga (I've done it twice, three weeks apart), going for runs (every few days I spend 20 minutes walking and compiling a running playlist and then I get tired and sit on a bench listening to the playlist and crying softly), and even learning French (there's a very specific French p*rn site I can't recommend enough).
Moving back in with your parents is a relief in many ways, but it's also hard and weird. I love my parents, something not everyone is lucky enough to be able to say. But even so, readjusting to the way they ran our shared household for 18 years of my life is jarring. I've been out of the house for nearly six years, and in that time I adapted habits and preferences of my own that aren't necessarily compatible with theirs.
For example: I, personally, love to buy an entire rotisserie chicken and eat it with my hands in the bathtub in the dark. Contrastingly, my mother and father prefer that chickens be shared at a table and eaten with cutlery. My father likes to go to the farmer's market as a family every Saturday at 9 AM. I like to sleep until noon and then emerge into the blinding light of day like a rabid raccoon to raid the fridge, bleary-eyed and hissing. My mother prefers the kitchen to be clean at all times. I like to manically bake corn muffins at three in the morning and then fall asleep with batter still on the ceiling. The possibilities for conflict go on and on.
In some ways, since coming home, I find myself regressing into a version of myself that whines, "What's for dinnnnnerrrrr moooommmmmm," demands fruit snacks at the grocery store, and generally craves my parents' attention and approval. Simultaneously, a part of me is desperate to assert my independence and autonomy, suddenly refusing to wear anything but pleather and chain-smoking clove cigarettes just to prove that I am not exactly who they think I am. This veritable frappuccino of feelings and impulses makes for an exhausting mental landscape at the best of times, but pair it with the mental-health-molotov-cocktail of 2020 and you've got yourself a real doozy.
Still, in the midst of a global pandemic, impending culture war, authoritarian takeover, and climate change so drastic that reproduction has become a selfish prospect, it's very comforting to hear my mother's absurdly loud laugh in the evenings as she watches TV in her recliner. Even as my world seems to be coming untethered around me, at least I can count on my dad coming outside to watch me pull the car into the driveway every single time I come home, as he always has. Despite the fog of uncertainty that continues to thicken around the rest of my life, at least my parents still shout "I love you" up the stairs before they go to bed.
While economic strife has surely driven the majority of young people back to their parents' homes, I think there is also something to be said for the irreplaceable comfort of the people or person who raised you. Even through the arguments, irritants, and inevitable differences in opinion that come part-and-parcel with living at home as an adult, moving home also feels like placating some animalistic instinct to return to the beginning, to gather the pack around you and hunker down when tragedy strikes.
And make no mistake: What we're living through now is a cultural, social, and political reckoning that is just as dire and life-or-death as every other major reckoning in the history of humankind. Of course you aren't doing well. Of course you went home.
This moment in time is also necessary. We had to collectively wake up to the truth of racial inequality, environmental devastation, and socio-political corruption at some point, but that doesn't make this period of inevitable rousing any more comfortable. That doesn't make being forced to go home suck any less. That doesn't make the lives lost to COVID-19 or the lives destroyed by wildfires any less tragic. But still, as we fight to make a better world, allow yourself some time to rest and grieve.
Listen to your dad's bad opinions about capitalism and your mom's adoration of Obama and remind yourself that no one has all the answers (not even you, even though you follow several socialist philosophy Instagram accounts). Consider that your parents are just as scared as you are and that they're also doing their best, just like you are. Hang up a poster in your room that makes you feel like yourself and try to (safely) see people your own age frequently, but don't squander this time with your parents, either.
If you're lucky enough to be back home (whatever that looks like for you) with people you feel safe with and with whom you have a relatively healthy relationship, try to think of this as a chance to get to know the people who raised you in a new light. Continue to do the work to make the world a better place for everyone, but consider that maybe some days, the work isn't about doom-scrolling through Twitter or angrily sharing posts to your Instagram story. Maybe some days that simply looks like sitting down with your mom and a cup of coffee.
Dying While Dying: COVID-19 & Police Brutality in Black America
2020 was supposed to usher in a decade of change and elevation. On December 31, 2019, personal and social resolutions were at the forefront of our minds as we collectively waited for midnight. For Black Americans exclusively, this was the hope that the atrocities from the 2010s in regards to race relations wouldn't accompany us. Still, it seems we've become more engrossed in the fight for our right to exist on several fronts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented paralysis in the world both economically and emotionally. Millions are without jobs, adequate health care, and engaged leadership. African Americans are the most impacted by the disease. As of June, there have been over 21,000 COVID-19 related deaths in the Black Community nationwide. Pre-existing health conditions and challenging living situations act as barriers preventing proper social distancing and protection/recovery. Though coronavirus is an unexpected nemesis for Blackness to combat, an old foe is still ever-present.
Currently, foreign and domestic protests and riots have erupted in response to the multiple deaths of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Memorial Day has captured the world's attention. In an 8 minute and 46-second clip, America has yet another lifelong lasting image of an unarmed African American male screaming, "I Can't Breathe" - an unholy sequel to the video of Eric Garner uttering those exact words in 2014 as his life was brutally driven from his body.
If Floyd's death was the explosion on a global scale, then Breonna Taylor's death was undoubtedly the fuse. Back in March, the 26-year-old Louisville EMT worker was fatally shot eight times when the Louisville Metro Police Department entered her home serving a no-knock warrant.
Overwhelming feelings of helplessness, anger and fear due to coronavirus, coupled with the recent murders at the hands of the authorities, have exacerbated our current temperaments. We are expected to adhere to the pleas of law officials and politicians to shelter in place and social distance when the particular cases of Floyd and Taylor indicate the antithesis of these requests when put into practice by the police.
While dealing with a faceless adversary in COVID-19, African Americans remain engaged in an ongoing battle with a known opposition. Black people have become savants at juggling multiple issues of our survival. But balancing civil unrest and possible contagion simultaneously, and at this magnitude, is an ask that is too great - despite our resiliency.
At the risk of further spreading coronavirus, the streets are running wild with rebellion. However, the sickness of racism, of injustice, is a pandemic that has been ever-present since this country's inception. We looked for 2020 to be the year of Exodus from all of the strife of the previous decade(s). But, it seems that we might have to endure a few more plagues before we see the Promised Land.
Dwayne "Deascent" Gittens is a Hip Hop artist, On-Air Personality, & Content Creator from The Bronx. Follow him on Instagram & Twitter @Deascent.
