Pennsylvania—and consequently, the US presidential election—should have been called for Joe Bidenonn Friday. The fact that it wasn’t called is a travesty—not just for Joe Biden, but for the rest of the country.
As The New York Times reported Saturday morning, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) is the only county with a substantial bulk of votes, both mail-in and provisional, yet to be counted. Significantly, “[t]he county’s mail-in ballots have so far overwhelmingly supported Mr. Biden, as have the provisional ballots.”
As The Times confirms, there is no reasonable doubt as to the outcome of Pennsylvania, and by extension, the election.
Remaining mail-in ballots are expected to widen Mr. Biden’s lead and potentially make him the winner of a state whose 20 electoral votes would vault him past the 270 needed to become the next president.
Perhaps the various networks are counting on Americans’ notoriously short memories of elections past in hopes they won’t notice that something fundamentally different is going on with the way this election is being called. The fact is that under standard practice, with Biden’s lead in PA what it is, there is no conceivable way Trump wins this election, and it would have been called yesterday if not sooner. As MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki showed us again and again Friday night, even the mail-ins and provisionals of the outlying, presumably “red” counties in Pennsylvania are skewing majority Biden. All of them. And aside from a relatively tiny number of overseas votes, these are the only votes remaining to be counted.
But we’re seeing the process of calling the election delayed. It’s not being delayed because of the pandemic, or out of some concern for what the remaining ballots will show. It’s being delayed out of fear and cowardice, and possibly a little touch of greed.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo sees that something unusual is happening here. As reported by Greg Dworkin in Daily Kos’ Abbreviated Pundit Roundup, Marshall believes that the networks have collectively decided to adopt a different standard for this election to be called.
The “theoretically possible” standard counsels the networks to wait until is is no longer theoretically possible for Donald Trump to win. “Theoretically possible” literally means, if Biden is winning by 30,000 in Pennsylvania, they would have to wait until the remaining vote count was 29,999, because all those 29,999 votes could “theoretically” be for Trump. The fact that an election could trigger a recount (which is unlikely in PA to begin with) is not typically an excuse for failing to call it.
That’s not only a “high” standard, as Marshall characterizes it—it’s a ridiculous standard. Every election in the past few decades has necessarily relied on extrapolation. Not waiting for the “theoretically impossible” to occur. If the “standard” being followed is anything even remotely resembling this “mathematical certainty” approach, then the networks have effectively abandoned their responsibility to the American people.
Adoption of this standard might make sense if we didn’t have one candidate who has consciously decided to spend the entire counting period maligning the election process and sowing corrosive doubts about the entire democratic process. But that is exactly what we have. And the excuse that waiting until they’re “absolutely certain” is hollow. Trump has amply demonstrated he is going to reject the legitimacy of any result not in his favor. It doesn’t matter to him when the election is “called”; that’s a moot point as far as he’s concerned. But calling it when it should be called would provide a strong counternarrative to Trump’s continuing malicious and self-serving efforts to paint the election as somehow “illegitimate.”
The practical effect of adopting this standard for the current election are twofold—it eliminates any responsibility on behalf of the television networks to inform the American people in a timely manner of the results, and it provides Donald Trump with an opportunity to further cast doubts on the integrity of our democracy.
Which is exactly what he’s been doing.
A texting company run by one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s top campaign officials sent out thousands of targeted, anonymous text messages urging supporters to rally where votes were being counted in Philadelphia on Thursday, falsely claiming Democrats were trying to steal the presidential election.
The messages directed Trump fans to converge at a downtown intersection where hundreds of protesters from the opposing candidates’ camps faced off Thursday afternoon. Pennsylvania is a crucial battleground state where former Vice-President Joe Biden’s jumped ahead Friday and in a televised address later predicted a victory that would give him the presidency.
“This kind of message is playing with fire, and we are very lucky that it does not seem to have driven more conflict,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s online watchdog Citizen Lab. Scott-Railton helped track down the source.
Here is the message, which essentially exhorts his supporters to commit violence.
“ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU!” the text said, directing recipients to “show your support” on a street corner near the Philadelphia Convention Center where votes were being counted and tensions were running high.
Trump’s campaign, of course, denied they sent these texts, even as Trump tweeted out the following:
So we have incitement to Trump supporters, falsely impugning the integrity of the election, and Trump himself undermining the vote count. Meanwhile, the same networks that elevated this human nightmare to power with their breathless coverage continue to dither and waste our time, applying a ridiculous standard they’ve never applied before to calling this election.
Not coincidentally, having Americans remaining unreasonably glued to their television sets also boosts their ratings and feeds their advertising coffers.
The longer he gets to do this, the worse for our country.
Call the goddamn election, you cowards.