I used to be active here a long time ago, but moved to Canada ~15 years ago. After moving, I became less active in US politics in general (although I still vote and pay attention, of course), and I’ve moved to being a lurker here.
In the past several days, a point has come up in conversations with my left-leaning friends, both here in Canada and in the US, roughly along the lines of: “no matter what happens now, it should have never even been this close!” I’ve said that myself in various ways too. And depending on how much emphasis you place on the word “this” in that sentence, the sentiment is nearly a tautology. With Trump and the Republicans as bad as they currently are, anything short of a landslide victory is not close enough!
However, was this election actually “close”? Sadly, I think this question and associated framings will matter in the coming weeks as we have to collectively and individually push back on multiple fronts against both legal and popular narratives.
Just because vote counting in some states seemed to take longer this year (thanks to Republicans) does NOT mean that this election was necessarily any closer than in recent past elections. Many people struggle psychologically with being in a state of uncertainty or lack of clarity for extended periods, experiencing high amounts of stress. These high stress levels associated with lack of certain knowledge are easily mis-attributable, in this case to the conflation between uncertainty in our state of knowledge about the vote totals and uncertainty in the actual margin of victory.
So, based on what we know now, the facts of this election are:
- Biden is on track to win the popular vote by over 4 million votes, or close to 3% points.
- 2016, 2004, 2000 were all much closer in terms of both absolute and percent margins.
- Biden is on track to win the electoral college 306-232.
- 2016, 2004, 2000 were all closer.
ThreeFour states this year (Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona) look like they will end up with a final margin of less than 1%.
- In every single election going back through the 1990s, there’s been at least one state with a margin of less than 1%, and often multiple states.
- In 2016 there were
2 4 states (MI, WI, PA and NH) under 1% margin. [Edited per comment by MorrellWI1983. Thanks.]
- In 2012 there was 1 state (FL) under 1%.
- In 2008 there were 2 states (NC and MO) under 1%.
- In 2004 there were 3 states (IA, NM, and WI) under 1%.
- In 2000 there were 5 states (FL, IA, NM, WI, and OR!) under 1%.
- In 1996 there was 1 state (KY) under 1%.
- In 1992 there were 2 states (NC and GA) under 1%.
From the above, I conclude that margins in this election were in line with what we’ve come to expect in the last ~30 years. I.e., it wasn’t closer than (what’s become) “normal”.
But that won’t stop the narratives. The mainstream media has a vested interest in (self-fulfilling) “America is extremely polarized” storylines. Of course, we are... but we have been for 25+ years at least. Has it gotten worse? Probably a bit. But, for better or worse, our two-party system continually “re-calibrates itself naturally” to produce elections that will be fairly close each time, no matter what. Whether they admit it rhetorically or not, parties shift to try to either capture (or move) the mythical “center”. More than anything, I think what’s actually changed related to partisanship is rather that one side of the partisan divide has abandoned all scruples, causing the existing divide to become more bitter and entrenched, more tribal (people are more likely to remain on the same side of the divide throughout their lifetime now, choosing their “team” once-and-for-all).
Probably in part to capitalize on this, the media have also (annoyingly) been portraying the counting of already-cast votes in the same “horserace” framing as they do for pre-election polling (“Biden is gaining / closing the gap on Trump in ...”). As others have pointed out too, the fact is, Biden has a set, unchangeable number of votes that’ve been cast for him at this point and so does Trump. Nothing is changing or “evolving” or dynamic, save the amount of information that we have about those two fixed numbers. Further, given what we know about early voting this election, if all votes were counted and reported immediately whenever cast, Biden would have been ahead from “begin to end” with no need for this (dangerously) misleading narrative.
Anyway, the main point here is that this election wasn’t particularly close. Troublingly, Biden didn’t win in a landslide, as he should have. But notwithstanding the dominant narratives, based on the strength of the numbers, he did win soundly and convincingly. And in my opinion, that fact is worth its own narrative.
(Edited for typos.)
(Edited to make my image smaller.)
Edit: It looks like AZ may squeeze down to less than 1% margin at this point too. We’ll see. —> it did.
Edit: Updated yet again after reading Nate Silver’s similar article (Biden Wins -- Pretty Convincingly in the End) and realizing I inexplicably forgot to include PA in the 2016 narrow-margin states despite knowing it was less than 1%.