CNN projects Biden has won PA, and thus the presidency. It has also been called by AP, NBC, and ABC.

&gt; but other networks didn&#x27;t feel it was safe.And might have been right, Biden&#x27;s lead in AZ keeps shrinking, 3 days ago his lead was 25% of the ballots left to count, now it&#x27;s 15.&gt; And then Nevada has obviously been won for days, but nobody was calling it because that would have put Fox and AP over 270.Although Biden&#x27;s lead has only grown there saying that it&#x27;s &quot;obviously won&quot; is a touch optimistic.

AP and Fox have access to proprietary survey data for AZ.

At the time, Nevada had a 8000 vote margin with over 100,000 votes outstanding. The real question is why swing states paused counting.

It was not obvious for Nevada, because the outstanding votes were the last 2 days of drop-off, which has skewed red, and there has been uncertainty about how Vegas would react considering Covid&#x27;s effect on their economy.

There was some interesting game theory stuff going on there, where AP and Fox called Arizona early, but other networks didn&#x27;t feel it was safe.And then Nevada has obviously been won for days, but nobody was calling it because that would have put Fox and AP over 270. So all the networks just started waiting for PA rather than calling the obvious for Nevada.

Looks like they were waiting for Biden to cross the PA recount threshold. He just did (0.51% &gt; 0.5%).

&gt; That really can&#x27;t be noted enough. That the count took so long is specifically because several legislatures decided to not allow any preprocessing of mail ballots, and to count mail ballots last.Indeed this bears repeating.The whole process mounting to the election day was engineered to sabotage and outright throw out votes from the opposition, even if that comes at the expense of the core principles of the whole political system.

Let&#x27;s bee specific: The legislature in PA. If PA were allowed to start counting before election day, this would have been called on Tuesday.

That&#x27;s a hyper partisan view of a much more complicated situation. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Republican legislature passed laws allowing early counting, which was blocked by the Democratic governor because it limited acceptance of ballots after the election. You can argue the merits of either side, but it isn&#x27;t sabotage or subterfuge.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Politics&#x2F;pennsylvania-counting-votes-election-day&#x2F;story?id=73993649" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Politics&#x2F;pennsylvania-counting-votes-...</a>

Moreover, some GOP-controlled counties in PA decided to not count mail-in ballots on election day either (they were allowed to start when polls open) and instead saved them all for the following day and beyond.

Waiting to starting the count until the window to vote is over seems like an inherently fair idea - it closes the information gap between absentee and day-of voters. Otherwise it’s like a game of Yankee Swap, where voting (or trading) last is best.

&gt; when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election nightThat really can&#x27;t be noted enough. That the count took so long is specifically because several legislatures decided to not allow any preprocessing of mail ballots, and to count mail ballots last.

Not really. Once the models project that it&#x27;s basically impossible, the DD&#x27;s call it. They call states like California or Arkansas once they get the exit poll data, before any votes are in.Fox News called Virginia for Biden when there were like 50% votes in and Trump led with 10%.They were uber cautious this time and waited for a &gt;0.5% lead.

&gt; The media was way too cautious in making the call here,It&#x27;s my understanding that it had zero to do with caution and all to do with the fact that the election was not decided.If there are still votes that were not counted and the slim margin between both candidates is smaller than the number of unaccounted votes then the election results are yet to be determined. Thus it would make zero sense to claim that one candidate was the winner when the votes that are yet to be counted are enough to sway the results.

&gt; Their cautiousness made sense. Projections just before the election showed a lot steeper win for Biden.You need to distinguish between the national vote, which met projections with a significant dem majority, and state races, some of which were close, which is also what was predicted.

Their cautiousness made sense. Projections just before the election showed a lot steeper win for Biden. It didn&#x27;t play out that way so it makes sense to be cautious.Trump had a lot more support among some demographics than people expected. as the race got tighter it made sense to doubt what might play out.

There&#x27;s an argument to be made that not making the call when the result was already certain, even if the margin of 0.5% hadn&#x27;t been reached yet, was irresponsible in the sense that it allowed Trump more time to promote this idea that he has won, everything&#x27;s fraudulent etc. (Just look at his last tweet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;realDonaldTrump&#x2F;status&#x2F;1325099845045071873" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;realDonaldTrump&#x2F;status&#x2F;13250998450450718...</a>)I disagree with that argument FWIW, but I can certainly understand it. Though I think people were just impatient to hear &quot;Biden has won&quot; be made official, even if they already knew. I certainly was.

It is. The longer it drags the longer you can feed fodder to conspiracies. Calling it too quickly would have been bad as well but not as bad as not calling when the end is clear. I think calling it now seems appropriate even though I don’t think Arizona should have beeen called.

Once it became clear that the election wouldn&#x27;t be called on election night, was there really any benefit to making an early call? Whether it was called on Thursday or Saturday seems kind of irrelevant when inauguration isn&#x27;t until January.It&#x27;s much better to be certain that wrong.

That bill also bans dropboxes and makes it harder to get a mail-in ballot. It&#x27;s just a normal voter suppression bill.

but it&#x27;s easy to understand why when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night,In Pennsylvania, the Republican House passed a bill to start counting three days early but it died in the Senate under threat of veto from the Democrat governor -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2396bbdd1617a82c4919127726778711" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apnews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2396bbdd1617a82c4919127726778711</a> The Democrats had a separate bill that would have started counting much earlier, but the Republicans opposed that for fear there would not be proper oversight over the counting process.

The opposite effect occurred in 2016. With Trump leading in east coast states, west coast states saw reduced Democrat turnout (relative to norm)

Well, the Republican legislature apparently discussed with the whitehouse about ignoring the popular vote and appointing electors for Trump (and was willing to talk about this on record)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;what-if-trump-refuses-concede&#x2F;616424&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;what-if...</a>So apparently the strategy was to make the vote counting look suspicious enough that it would give cover for essentially a coup.

&gt;The media was way too cautious in making the call here, but it&#x27;s easy to understand why when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night, likely to benefit their candidate through the confusion of swinging red and then blue.I&#x27;m curious about the efficiency of this strategy. I&#x27;d figure they&#x27;d gain more by allowing early counting, leaking the pro-democrat results and thus lowering democrat turnout on election day. After all, why bother voting when it&#x27;s already in the bag and so on.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Politics&#x2F;pennsylvania-counting-votes-election-day&#x2F;story?id=73993649" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abcnews.go.com&#x2F;Politics&#x2F;pennsylvania-counting-votes-...</a>Republicans in Pennsylvania, a swing state, created a law that didn&#x27;t allow for absentee ballots to begin to be counted until 8pm on election day.

&gt; when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election nightHaven&#x27;t been watching this closely. Care to share some refs? Thanks

Because minorities are unable to find polling locations? I don’t understand your claim.

It&#x27;s coming either way. Once a country with a similar representitive system hits 80% urbanization, it&#x27;s government tends to be more progressive, especially on certain hot topic policies like gun control.You can already see how the popular vote for president is consistently Democrat. There is also a pact of states that promise to vote for the popular vote winner once their ranks have 270 electoral votes. A good visual way to view this divide is the map showing the county-by-county vote allocation.

&gt; pressure your red representatives to stop demonizing mail-in&#x2F;advance voting, and stop destroying the postal systemYou can pressure them all you want on that. It won&#x27;t change a thing because making it easier to vote via mail will possibly result in them being voted out by making it easier for minorities to vote.

And stop closing polling places in urban (Black) neighborhoods, etc, etc

&gt; pressure your red representatives to stop demonizing mail-in&#x2F;advance voting, and stop destroying the postal systemI don&#x27;t see why expressing concerns about postal voting would necessarily be a partisan thing. Don&#x27;t the TWO major political blocks want a fair process? Perhaps everyone?...especially in light of evidence of documented cases. Here is a sample query for: &quot;Fraudulent Use of Absentee Ballots which resulted in a criminal conviction&quot; (with results ruled as recently as 2020):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;voterfraud&#x2F;search?combine=&amp;state=All&amp;year=&amp;case_type=24487&amp;fraud_type=24489" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;voterfraud&#x2F;search?combine=&amp;state=Al...</a>The result set doesn&#x27;t include &quot;Duplicate voting&quot;, &quot;Impersonation&quot;, &quot;Altering the vote count&quot;, which are separate criteria (relevant to mention because they are part of the ongoing allegations).

The media was way too cautious in making the call here, but it&#x27;s easy to understand why when the Republicans made it so difficult to count absentee ballots before election night, likely to benefit their candidate through the confusion of swinging red and then blue.If you don&#x27;t want this to happen again, pressure your red representatives to stop demonizing mail-in&#x2F;advance voting, and stop destroying the postal system.

Direct link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;live-news&#x2F;trump-biden-election-results-11-07-20&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;edition.cnn.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;live-news&#x2F;trump-biden-elect...</a>Also called by ABC, NBC and the AP (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AP&#x2F;status&#x2F;1325112826072084480" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;AP&#x2F;status&#x2F;1325112826072084480</a>). Congratulations, America.

Or 6 years, if you also count the 2016 primaries.

Getting Trump out of office was the number one priority. We can doom about the other stuff later.

You still have to deal with a 6&#x2F;3 hard-right supreme court, courts packed to the gill with FedSoc pasties, and most likely (though depending on a GA runoff) the same senate which basically gridlocked Obama&#x27;s second term and prepared the grounds for Trump&#x27;s term.

&gt; particularly if the economy goes south as it&#x27;s been projected to do in 2021.&quot;As you know, we&#x27;ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.&quot; -- Lisa Simpson

I am sad to say that it is likely not over; the people who voted for Trump didn&#x27;t wink out of existence. The Democrats barely won the presidency and lost ground in Congress. It&#x27;s really a tremendous slap in the face for them by the public, given how unfit his opponent and those who aligned with him were.Things could easily flip the other way in 2024, particularly if the economy goes south as it&#x27;s been projected to do in 2021.

I have little doubt they will be worse.The process isn&#x27;t over yet (AP News opinion withstanding) but this wasn&#x27;t really a victory for Democrats at all in my opinion assuming the probable happens.The polls at minimum were very wrong which means either fixed or stupid take your pick.We are going to see a lot of incidents of shady doings around the election (how could we not?) brought up over the next couple of months.Biden and team won&#x27;t really be able to deliver rainbows and ponies and may have to get quite authoritarian to quell dissent.Trump leaves on a high note with a large amount of support and Republicans made big gains and greatly expanded the party.A whole lot will have to go right for this to be anything like a victory for the Democrats. It almost would have been better for them if they let the chips fall and Trump take the rap for what&#x27;s going down next.These 10&#x27;s of millions of people aren&#x27;t going anywhere, they&#x27;ll be even madder next time around and in the polls watching like hawks with court sanction. And Trump will be talking the whole time about the injustice and how he was railroaded. Rightly or wrongly people will listen.

No, I won&#x27;t get them back because that&#x27;s how time works.

You will not get them back, because that is how democracy works. Lots of people will want their last 4 years back in 2024.

If you thought the Trump presidency was bad, wait till you see Trump News or Trump TV.

Thank god.Now I want the last 4 years of my life back.

It&#x27;s predictive of a forthcoming legally-significant event.

As Hamilton famously wrote in Federalist Paper #85:&quot;It&#x27;s not official until it&#x27;s Facebook Official.&quot;

Surely somewhere in the emanations and penumbras of the constitution we can find that the AP’s decision is binding.

Joe Biden has added &quot;president elect&quot; to his bio. When Trump tweets that he won, Twitter flags it.

Yes, I&#x27;m pretty sure everybody here understands that AP doesn&#x27;t officially decide who wins the election.It still has significance.

Looking around the thread you&#x27;ll see that might not be the case. I think the comment meant to correct a (hopefully uncommon) misconception that the election is now final before all the votes have been counted, which of course isn&#x27;t true.

what an obnoxious way to rain on a parade. everyone is more than aware of how the electoral system works.

Yes, but note how quickly it was picked up by general populace as fait accompli.

&gt; Do you realize no one thinks it has legal significance?Almost everyone does.

There absolutely is room for Biden not to have 270 electoral votes, if investigations reveal (... correctly or incorrectly) big enough issues that some states don&#x27;t send electors.I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a realistic way for Trump to have 270 electoral votes, but he could still possibly be awarded the Presidency by a weird-ass one-vote-per-state vote in the House.

Do you realize no one thinks it has legal significance?But it is a marker that people use as shorthand. There is no getting around the fact that Biden will have 270 electoral votes.

Everybody does realize that this has no legal significance, right?

2016 HN had a big, busy thread for Trump&#x27;s election and didn&#x27;t wait for the Electoral College to vote in December.It stayed up. Please show the same consideration.

Very wise, it sucks to end up trapped on an island first politically, then economically and finally socially.The US understands that stick very well when the topic is its opponents.

&gt; When I vote I make sure I pick the candidate that other countries would be happy with.Is not something that the common voter could control. You will do in the 50% of the cases in fact, just by chance.And is great, because deliberately burning all bridges with all your allies and to pee in the curtains just to make a vanity statement, is not a productive way to work in a multinational team to obtain your goals.

I agree.When I vote I make sure I pick the candidate that other countries would be happy with.

Care to tell us what you&#x27;re linking? It&#x27;s behind some wall (and breaks the back button as well).

Why is this getting downvoted?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spiegel.de&#x2F;international&#x2F;germany&#x2F;the-u-s-elections-germany-looks-across-the-atlantic-with-anxiety-and-hope-a-7d866483-ceeb-4de3-9e3c-617aaa916ec8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spiegel.de&#x2F;international&#x2F;germany&#x2F;the-u-s-electio...</a>

&gt; Unfortunately, Trump&#x27;s brand of conspiracy theory populism resonates with a significant number of American voters more so than any other political ideology.The problem runs deeper than that. Unfortunately Trump&#x27;s blend of populist rhetoric fueled by conspiracy theories, divisiveness, and victimization coupled with a vindictive&#x2F;authoritarian agenda has seeped out of the US borders and reverberated in european countries that are now struggling (again) with he rise of fascist parties.Take for example Spain&#x27;s Vox party, which is quite literally a fascist apologist which copies Trump and recently even went as far as claiming that Spain&#x27;s current government is the worst in 80 years, subtly bundling Franco&#x27;s fascist regime in comparison and thus stating that it was a better alternative than the current democratic regime.The free world has a problem with fascism in specific and authoritarian regimes in general, and Trump contributed to whitewash these political movements to the point that they might regain mainstream status throughout the world.

Unfortunately, Trump&#x27;s brand of conspiracy theory populism resonates with a significant number of American voters more so than any other political ideology. Trump was so popular that his base increased over the last four years. So popular with that base that an actual messianic cult formed around him. Trump himself just wasn&#x27;t charismatic, competent or forward thinking enough to capitalize on it at scale the way populist dictators in other countries have. But that still leaves the danger of a competent successor to Trump in the future.What we need to watch for is whether or not the Republican Party interprets this as a repudiation of Trumpism, or merely of Trump himself.

Hey, I would encourage you to follow politics more closely! If you want a broad overview, I would start with the wikipedia page for Donald Trump. I&#x27;d also spend some time reading about media literacy and bias - your comment about Nobel Peace Prize nominations stands out as a bit of red flag that you may be uncritically repeating something you heard from a far-right editorial source. Good luck, there&#x27;s a lot of information to synthesize, but this stuff is really important!

&gt; and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.FWIW, Nobel Peace Prize nominations are worthless. National level politicians, professors can nominate anyone.[1] You could find someone (or three people) to nominate you.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nobelprize.org&#x2F;nomination&#x2F;peace&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nobelprize.org&#x2F;nomination&#x2F;peace&#x2F;</a>

Does teargassing protestors for a photo op count as &quot;violent and authoritarian&quot;?

Peace Prize nominations are worthless. Literally, worthless. Anyone can be nominated by anyone.Yes, the fact that we didn&#x27;t get into any hot war is pretty much the only thing that Trump has going for him, though it was partially due to others backing him off bad ideas.He wanted to remove us from a South Korean defense agreement, which would have been huge for each country&#x27;s economy and defenses.He bombed an Iranian general in Iraq - it was a huge gambit of arguable utility, and the only reason the Iranians didn&#x27;t get more international support for retaliation was because they shot down a civilian airliner on accident.He talked so much crap to NK that there was serious concern of an escalation in fighting.But, yes. We didn&#x27;t have any major foreign-based terror attacks, and we didn&#x27;t get entangled in fighting a new conflict.As far as the peace deals, I think they could be good, but they haven&#x27;t &quot;fixed&quot; anything yet. The Palestinians still have no sovereignty, the Israelis still deny Arabs rights of citizenship, Iran and SA still are at each other&#x27;s throats while Yemen, AFAIK, is still a humanitarian crisis.China is perpetrating a holocaust on ethnic minorities, and Trump congratulated Xi on his success there.The man is no human rights hero.---edit: Not to mention his domestic policy failings, his characterizations as sitting president of all who disagree with him as &quot;enemies&quot;, his rhetoric around protesting, his encouragement toward violent right-wing actors, and his use of the National Guard to clear out a public square to get a picture taken with a holy book he has never read.

I&#x27;ve always thought that most of the rage came from a dying traditional media quickly realizing they could capitalize on Trump&#x27;s bombastic style for a critically important advertisement cash injection. Look at viewership of major media properties declining until around 2016. Opinion pieces, designed to induce rage-clicks, are vastly more cost effective than actual journalism or just reporting the facts. Plus, for the average viewer, it&#x27;s just plain fun to read your &quot;team&#x27;s&quot; spin on the facts. I&#x27;m sure the typical response to this is that &quot;the media has always been like this&quot;, but I certainly haven&#x27;t seen a situation quite this extreme in a while.If you spent all of your time in a bubble reading these opinion pieces from a select group of sources and news aggregators that presumably aggregate the news that is most likely to generate ad impressions&#x2F;clicks (Reddit, Google News seems to push highly inflammatory opinion pieces), sure, I can see how you&#x27;d think Trump is some sort of fascist dictator hellbent on destroying the world. The average political junky isn&#x27;t going to spend brainpower trying to understand the diametrically opposed.To be clear though, most level headed individuals don&#x27;t actually believe Trump is a fascist. That&#x27;s an extremist view (and obviously insulting to anyone who has lived under fascism) that&#x27;s just used to sow discord and get a reaction.

Regardless of whether or not he accomplished those things, his outspoken goading of his base and complimenting other authoritarian or authoritarian adjacent rulers on Twitter and other media outlets is a clear source on violent and authoritarian points of view.

&gt; I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars.Don&#x27;t believe everything you hear. This is false.&gt; He also supposedly brokered numerous peace dealsLike what?&gt; and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.As others have noted, this means nothing.&gt; Is there a lot of violence I&#x27;m missing that warrants calling him &quot;violent and authoritarian&quot;?The violence is largely hypothetical, and would, if it materialized, probably be perpetrated by white-supremacist militias rather than the U.S. military. But that Trump is authoritarian there can be no reasonable doubt. He has a long record of using his power to fire anyone who speaks against him, to harass anyone who speaks against him who he does not have the power to fire, and to protect and grant favors to anyone who supports him politically, even if they have been convicted of crimes. That kind of behavior is the textbook definition of authoritarian.

&gt; He also supposedly brokered numerous peace dealsNo need for &quot;supposedly&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;briefings-statements&#x2F;president-donald-j-trump-brokers-historic-peace-agreement-israel-sudan&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whitehouse.gov&#x2F;briefings-statements&#x2F;president-do...</a>

He was busy inciting riots in his own country and calling soldiers suckers and losers. He almost triggered a 3rd world war by killing Suleimani.

&gt; violent and authoritarian points of viewI don&#x27;t follow politics too closely, but I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars. He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.Is there a lot of violence I&#x27;m missing that warrants calling him &quot;violent and authoritarian&quot;?

&gt; USA sets an example for other Western countriesThis is what we really need to fix.

Not an American citizen, but I’m really glad that Biden won. USA sets an example for other Western countries, and Trump wasn’t a good example. I hope you’re able to recover from Trumpism and that the Republican Party rejects such violent and authoritarian points of view.Edit: I’m not saying US citizens should think of other nations when casting their vote. Just glad — as non-US citizen - that Biden won and that our national far-right politicians can finally shut up about Trump

&gt; No, the real call isn&#x27;t until the electoral college votes on December 14th.Doubtful. Doesn&#x27;t look like Trump is going to concede. Likely litigation and supreme court in the coming weeks.&gt; The media is calling states when their projections are confident enough (and possibly when the difference is above the automatic recount threshold).The media has been projecting trump to lose since 2016. Well since 2014 really.Either way, it&#x27;s history in the making. Comfy chair. Popcorn. All set.

No, the real call isn&#x27;t until the electoral college votes on December 14th. The media is calling states when their projections are confident enough (and possibly when the difference is above the automatic recount threshold).

The typical term is &quot;presumptive&quot;.  Trump was the presumptive nominee until the RNC met.  Biden is the presumptive victor, pending completion of vote counts and EC vote.  But people just shorten it to the (foregone conclusion of) victor.

Donald Trump was called the Republican nominee for months before the convention even though you could say that was the &quot;media&quot; making the call. In fact, he didn&#x27;t become the nominee until the vote at the convention was certified.But it is completely irrelevant. Biden will be the next president.

Not saying Biden didn’t win, but is it really the media that makes the call?

Which News Outlets Have Called the Presidential Race:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;03&#x2F;upshot&#x2F;network-race-call-tracker.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;03&#x2F;upshot&#x2F;networ...</a>

Absurd. There is an identically titled article from election night 2016, for Trump. HN has consistently carried water for Trump by allowing a small number of HNers to flag Trump critical articles, for four years.Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12907201" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12907201</a>

The NYTimes one has also been flagged now, and just about every comment in that thread has been downvoted heavily. My guess is it&#x27;s a small group of users flagging everything about the election results.

Politics is usually against the HN guidelines.Also there&#x27;s a new thread from the NY Times that has more votes and isn&#x27;t flagged <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25016070" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25016070</a>

&gt; There&#x27;s an identically titled one for Trump from 2016.It would probably be flagged today, too; the tolerance for mainstream political content has dropped since 2016.

It&#x27;s flagged why? There&#x27;s an identically titled one for Trump from 2016.

It wasn&#x27;t flagged.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12909752" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12909752</a>

Yeah, I&#x27;m not sure, the one from 2016 where Donald Trump won had a very nice discussion on it.

Yea, but we&#x27;ve always referred to them as president elect once it&#x27;s obvious they will win.

No, one becomes the president elect after the electoral college votes, which is still a month away.

Biden will now begin to receive intelligence briefings. He is the President-Elect (which is not a legal term - it is a media one - so it is silly to insist your definition is correct)

Technically it’s false because one doesn’t become President-Elect until vote counts are officially certified.

Headline is inaccurate. He&#x27;s not president elect until a joint session of congress counts the certificates of votes from the electoral college and declares him as such.Yeah, Biden likely will be president elect. But the news media&#x27;s call of what they think is likely is in no way official.Edit: When I wrote this, the headline was along the lines of &quot;Joe Biden is President-Elect.&quot;

I don&#x27;t understand why this is flagged. It&#x27;s highly relevant to tech (particularly given trump&#x27;s moves on Chinese tech firms and his treatment of social media) and from a legitimate source.

All: before reading further, make sure you&#x27;re up on the site guidelines and don&#x27;t post political or ideological flames to this thread. If you&#x27;re hot under the collar, please cool down and wait for your curiosity to come back before commenting (and maybe even reading) further. This is a good test case to see if HN can stick to its intended spirit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>Edit: There are now multiple pages of comments in this thread. If you want to see the later pages, click &#x27;More&#x27; at the bottom of the earlier pages. Or get there like this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=2</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=3</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=4</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=5</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=6</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=7</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25015967&amp;p=8</a>---As many have pointed out, a dozen or so submissions on this topic were flagged by users. That&#x27;s actually the immune system working as intended, but another component of the system is that moderators rescue the very most historic stories so HN can have a single big thread about them. We did that 4 years ago, also for Brexit, etc.Since this was the first submission on the topic, it seems fairest to be the one to restore. (It&#x27;s still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and&#x2F;or lottery.)I changed the URL from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnn.com&#x2F;</a> since that is not the most useful link and the AP seems as close as one can get to a neutral source.

2000 also had the &quot;hanging chads&quot; issue and confusing ballots that potentially caused people to choose a different candidate from what they wanted.

A few differences:* In 2000 it was one tipping-point state. Here, Biden has multiple states putting him over the top.* The margin in those states is larger than in Florida. The final official Florida count gave the victory to Bush by 537 votes.* 2000 involved a recount of legitimately questionable ballots. Trump&#x27;s legal cases (thus far) have been judged by experts to be far less serious.* Trump (so far) is not challenging enough ballots to give him the lead in the tipping-point state.

I think this is all anyone is really asking for.

Courts do not typically decide elections.

Yes, at least in theory. The simple reason is that in the end not the media, but the courts will decide.

No. Biden is likely to win across multiple states by a large margin, notably in PA where he is above the point that would require a recount.

No. For the many reasons others have noted and the elimination of the &quot;hanging chad&quot;. [0][0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;666812854&#x2F;the-florida-recount-of-2000-a-nightmare-that-goes-on-haunting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;12&#x2F;666812854&#x2F;the-florida-recount...</a>

The big difference is that 2000 revolved around a disputed recount, in a race with a margin of fewer than 1000 votes. There will be recounts in this race, but:(1) There&#x27;s no reason to believe they&#x27;ll change the outcome much (recounts in 2016 didn&#x27;t) --- states have learned since 2000 and have moved away from faulty ballot designs.(2) The recounts will be occurring in multiple states, and Trump needs to sweep them.(3) The margins in those recounts are much bigger than in 2000 --- tens of thousands of votes, not hundreds.

Look at it logically. Bush was ahead by 537 votes. The court wrangling happened for so long and there were so many delays that it was impossible to do a recount in time for the legally mandated date of certification.Biden is ahead here. Even if you remove PA or AZ, he&#x27;d still have enough electoral votes to win.He&#x27;s going to be President. The only person who doesn&#x27;t get that at this point is Trump, and everyone around him is just bowing to his whims.

Amount of misinformation coming out is really concerning.  SharpieGate, fake videos of ballot stuffing, more votes than registered voters etc.

Here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;wp-srv&#x2F;aponline&#x2F;20001108&#x2F;aponline183922_000.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;wp-srv&#x2F;aponline&#x2F;20001108&#x2F;apon...</a>

What do you mean &quot;all media called Gore the winner&quot;? I can&#x27;t find any evidence of that. According to Wikipedia [1], &quot;on November 8 ... the networks declared that Bush had carried Florida and therefore been elected president. ... after all votes were counted, ... the networks retracted their declarations that Bush had won Florida and the presidency&quot;.Also, note that Gore privately conceded the election that night, but retracted it after further counting due to the &lt;1000 vote margin.So in fact major networks (including CNN, ABC, FOX) initially called Bush the winner, but retracted that afterwards due to the possibility of a recount.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2000_United_States_presidential_election" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2000_United_States_presidentia...</a>

The media also called Tilden over Hayes in 1876 and Dewey over Truman in the 1940s. Its almost as if they&#x27;re not the ones to decide the winner of an election.

It&#x27;s more nuanced than that. Gore wanted some select counties recounted, bush wanted no counties recounted, but if there was going to be a rexound then bush wanted the whole state recounted. In the end the SCbrules that the 14th amendment said that including votes with &quot;hanging Chad&#x27;s&quot; and other clear intent required the whole state to be recounted. Gore conceeded because there wasn&#x27;t enough time and he believed that a whole state recount wouldn&#x27;t have favored him in the end. History reflects that it may have been a bad strategy for Gore to try and recount just some counties because he may well have won if he argued for a state wide recount from the beginning.

Another thing that complicated this was that the way you punched the ballot resulted in the chad going into a waste bin. Those waste bins would fill up to the point where it would physically prevent you from being able to punch out your chad.That election and SCOTUS ruling was a mess, and as a consequence did a lot of damage to this countries institutions.

The biggest factor in Florida is that the ballot marking system that Florida used at that time was extremely prone to failure, especially with regards to machine reading of ballots (which itself could cause an apparent mark on the ballot!). This means that trying to divine whether or not a ballot recorded an intent to vote for a candidate can be subjective and depends on the exact standard you want to use, which Florida didn&#x27;t specify (and the Florida Supreme Court ruled was ultimately too vague).Since 2000, most states have switched to optical scan ballots as their paper records. These ballots have much lower error rates, closer to 1 error per million votes. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s been a single race using optical scan ballots where a recount actually caused a winner to switch.

The sad part is that the popular vote has a much cleaner margin, and going forward this is what medias should report if people want change.

The Associated Press, who called the election this year, and who has been calling US elections since 1848, didn&#x27;t call the election for either side in 2000:&quot;AP did not call the closely contested race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore – we stood behind our assessment that the margin in Florida made it too close to call.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ap.org&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;topics&#x2F;politics&#x2F;elections&#x2F;how-we-call-races" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ap.org&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;topics&#x2F;politics&#x2F;elections&#x2F;how-we-ca...</a>

How does this election relate to the 2000 election when all media called Gore the winner, but then in December, Bush became the president elect?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;jonathanponciano&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-2000-election-wasnt-decided-until-december-after-a-recountheres-what-happened-to-the-stock-market&#x2F;?sh=4be60bfd625b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;jonathanponciano&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;the...</a>&quot;On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles led to the highly controversial 5–4 Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount.&quot;Can this happen again this time?

Yeah, reading dang&#x27;s wording again brought back memories of that thread and all the events back then - and my general disbelief at the result.This year in particular has been weird for me for passage-of-time; it feels simultaneously like the pandemic has been a constant forever - but also, spring and summer have gone so fast and now it&#x27;s almost 2021.

Anyone else get weird vibes reading that? If feels like that comment was written yesterday and an eternity ago. It&#x27;s feels like 4 years just passed by in a jiffy but at the same time, it felt like it was the longest 4 years of my life.

(We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25017129" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25017129</a>)

dang&#x27;s comment from 4 years ago on this subject (Trump&#x27;s election win): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12910929" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12910929</a>

Agreed. One of the factors that makes HN superior to the likes of reddit is the lack of overt karma farming which reduces the quality of discourse.

&gt; It&#x27;s still on our todo list to have some form of karma sharing for situations like this, to make it be less of a race and&#x2F;or lottery.Just disable karma on topics like these. They are going to be submitted multiple times and very quickly anyway, nobody &quot;needs&quot; the karma and it doesn&#x27;t matter if nobody gets it.

Historically, when the President and at least one house of Congress are opposing parties, the federal government tends to be gridlocked except in time of national emergency (e.g., 9&#x2F;11).This, I believe, is why the markets are reacting rather optimistically to the election results. Market makers clearly believe that a Biden presidency and a Republican Senate will get very little done, pass very few new laws, and spend a lot of time quarreling. This allows the economy to essentially run on auto-pilot, which in a free market system is rather conducive to growth.If however the Senate swings to the Democrats after all the votes are counted, it may be a different story.

The guy elected promoted and voted for the Iraq war. Let&#x27;s ease up on saying the foreign policy is going to be good.Where did Trump kowtow to dictators?

Return of a coordinated US foreign policy, which includes supporting allies and not kowtowing to dictators, will bring stability to global financial markets. With the US once again making decisions based on facts and science and sound economic policy, I fully expect the US economy to get back into stable, modest growth (vs. the last 4 years of chaotic instability. If the government is unstable, the economy reacts pessimisticly).

Here&#x27;s Moody&#x27;s pre-election analysis (PDF)[0]. Overall they viewed a Democratic win as more economically productive than a Republican one.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moodysanalytics.com&#x2F;-&#x2F;media&#x2F;article&#x2F;2020&#x2F;the-macroeconomic-consequences-trump-vs-biden.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.moodysanalytics.com&#x2F;-&#x2F;media&#x2F;article&#x2F;2020&#x2F;the-mac...</a>

More predictability in the market, even more so if the Senate remains in Republican hands (since the ensuing political deadlock would make it unlikely that we&#x27;ll see major legislation pass over the next two years).

Probably not a lot for quite a while to be honest. The virus is still here, the deficit is still ballooning and Biden won&#x27;t even be in office for another few months. Even when he is, it will take time for policies to be formulated, enacted and eventually have any effect.

You won’t see 60% income tax on 400k. That would require an additional 10%+ new income tax (which no one is asking on a 400k income). Even then, you’d not lose 60% of your income. You’d lose around 35%-40% to taxes still because of how tax brackets work.

Closer relations with China. Reverse on immigration. US attracts&#x2F;accepts more foreign workers. Probably a raising dollar and lower stockmarket. The high taxes might see some flee high tax states&#x2F;regions (living in New York city making 400k will cost you 60%+ of income tax) to lower cost states or out of country or remote.Overall remote work should increase with a different lockdown tone at the federal level creating uncertainy in commercial real estate.

No one really knows.A big factor will be who wins the Senate, and that won’t be decided until January due to two run off elections in Georgia.The two possible outcomes in the Senate will still leave questions about what, if any, additional stimulus legislation will be passed, and my guess is that this has the potential to impact the markets and exchange rates significantly.There is no easy answer to your question, so I would start reading up on the potential outcomes and relevant legislation if it might have a material impact on you.

Likely the biggest change for the  next year will be strategy for fighting Covid. Expect vast expansion of test and trace, bigger push for mask mandates, but also earlier reopening of public spaces and a sharper recovery in second half of 2021.  Impact on the dollar is a crap shoot due to huge Fed intervention that never wound down from the last recession.

Probably not as much as this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;M1REAL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;M1REAL</a>

As someone who is not that much into politics but receives salary in US dollar - what does Biden win mean for the US economy and the dollar?

Still a bit early to say &quot;much more&quot;: Arizona can still flip (it&#x27;s been inching ever closer and is at 0.6% difference at 90% counted) and Georgia has already announced a recount because it&#x27;s so close.If those do both actually end up in Trumps favor, that puts him only 11 electoral votes short. If the voting machine errors in Michigan do turn out to be a thing (and the error is large enough), or he wins legal battles there or in Pennsylvania, that&#x27;s enough to flip the whole election.It&#x27;s a very long shot, but this isn&#x27;t actually over yet until everything is counted and verified.

Probably true but faithless elector laws are at the state level. There were 7 validated faithless electors in 2016, the most ever.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fairvote.org&#x2F;faithless_elector_state_laws" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fairvote.org&#x2F;faithless_elector_state_laws</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Faithless_elector#Legal_rulings" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Faithless_elector#Legal_ruling...</a>

Faithless electors will not invalidate the results, especially in this case where Biden has much more than 270 electoral votes.

Nitpick: they vote on Dec 14th, but the votes are counted on Jan 6th. Thanks for the link, very educational!

They’ve been keeping those ballots separate and their are 1k of them. They don’t matter.

That was already the policy and was happening before the ruling, the ruling basically just formalized the policy. Doesn’t change anything.

There really aren&#x27;t; as that article says, the state was already doing what the GOP sued to require, and those ballots are both small enough in number and likely enough to favor Biden that even saying there are &quot;questions&quot; is overblown.

They were already doing that; and even if they weren&#x27;t, it would not change the outcome.Remember that when it comes to non-emergency motions, courts are unlikely to grant the form of relief requested when doing so would be moot.

They don&#x27;t matter.  Biden&#x27;s margin in PA is without those votes.

It’s tantalizing and, in my opinion, overtly political that the Washington Post uses the phrase “enforce segregation” here. This similar story from Reuters says “separate”:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;BigStory12&#x2F;idUSKBN27N030" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;BigStory12&#x2F;idUSKBN27N030</a>

Yeah... there&#x27;s questions about mail-in&#x2F;absentee voting that are going to the supreme court.&#x27;Justice Alito temporarily grants Pennsylvania GOP request to enforce segregation of ballots that arrived after Election Day&#x27;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;pennsylvania-ballots-gop&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;064fdf94-2056-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;pennsylvania-ballots...</a>

Georgia and Pennsylvania don&#x27;t have laws preventing faithless electors from voting against their state&#x27;s winning candidate.It&#x27;s looking like the lead will be big enough that even in the (very) small chance things go wrong it won&#x27;t matter.

Clinton conceded the election to Trump the day after the election.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;nov&#x2F;09&#x2F;hillary-clinton-concedes-election-donald-trump-speech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;nov&#x2F;09&#x2F;hillary-clin...</a>

Democrats prayed for such an occurrence in 2016 to no avail. Why do you believe the results will be different this time?

Dec 14th is a better deadline to watch. That&#x27;s the date at which a state&#x27;s &quot;Certificates of Ascertainment&quot; is due. If they miss this deadline, the electorate votes are forfeited.Keep in mind some of these swing states don&#x27;t have strong one-party control of the state legislatures, and there could be a strong appetite for a recount or closer scrutiny of the ballots.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crsreports.congress.gov&#x2F;product&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;IF&#x2F;IF11641" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crsreports.congress.gov&#x2F;product&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;IF&#x2F;IF11641</a>

The Electoral College votes on the first Monday after the 2nd Wednesday in December; so the 14th. What happens on 6 January is Congress ratifying the electoral votes.And it&#x27;s the state legislatures that effectively elect their state&#x27;s electors, which needs to be done before 14 December.

I am holding my breath until Jan 6th at least when electoral college votes:Url: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crsreports.congress.gov&#x2F;product&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;IF&#x2F;IF11641" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crsreports.congress.gov&#x2F;product&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;IF&#x2F;IF11641</a>The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline

The fact that it always happens doesn’t make it any better. Media announcements have real effects. We already saw this happen in 2000.

This happens every election. States always take days or weeks to certify their results.

Because the government is made up of laws, not media corporations.

That is an old tradition. Why should the states call a national election?

I found the AP&#x27;s article (who [edit: many, not nearly everyone] goes off of for race calls) to be interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ap.org&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;topics&#x2F;politics&#x2F;elections&#x2F;how-we-call-races" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ap.org&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;topics&#x2F;politics&#x2F;elections&#x2F;how-we-ca...</a>

How could this possibly work? Do you want to legally bar speech with the content &quot;We have a 99.9% confidence that X will win&quot;?

The media calling the election has no legal force. In principle, they look at the results and call the election once they think it&#x27;s highly unlikely that a particular candidate can lose. Sometimes that call is badly made, like Florida 2000 or, IMO, Fox calling Arizona prematurely. But it&#x27;s misinforming viewers to claim that all candidates still have a chance after some point in time.

That&#x27;s how it&#x27;s done in most countries in Europe as well in my experience. To be clear in the end it&#x27;s not what the media say that matters, it&#x27;s the certified vote counts but those come in often much later. In this case I believe that some states like Alaska will be counting ballots well into next week.It makes sense to call the race once the lead is considered significant enough that the remaining ballots can&#x27;t statistically change the outcome.A good counterexample in this election is Arizona, that&#x27;s been called early for Biden by some outlets (AP and Fox News IIRC) but is still considered to be potentially winnable by Trump by the others. In this case it is possible that AP and Fox were a bit too trigger happy.

Yes but that isn’t the messaging here. “Biden won the election” is.If there is some kind of court challenge or recount that changes the outcome, it’s really bad for trust in the democratic system. Better to just be patient and wait - but patience is something lacking these days.

What if you look at &quot;calling a race&quot; as &quot;reporting on the underlying mathematical trajectories based off of empirical vote evidence&quot;?Given I believe that&#x27;s an accurate description of what&#x27;s involved in a news organization calling a race, they&#x27;re not making the news, but reporting it, albeit in a form that makes it more palatable to the average reader.

Yes, of course it was irresponsible for Trump to do so. That has nothing to do with my comment, which is about the news media.

You must also find it massively irresponsible for Trump to state he won the election as early as Wednesday morning.Fortunately, his statements, like those of the media, aren’t how the winner is determined. Rather, all the votes are counted and then certified. The media waits until the unofficial counts are outside of the reach of recounts. Trump’s legal challenges are contradictory: he’s arguing to continue counting in states where he is behind and stop counting in states where he is ahead. It doesn’t work that way.After 2000, the media has been very conservative in waiting to call elections. In any case, they’ve twice miscalled a presidential election but it didn’t impact the ultimate winner, because at the end of the day, we follow the rule of law.

Completely independently of who won&#x2F;will win this election, I find it massively irresponsible that media outlets are calling it before actual states are. The media should report the news, not make it.

I think I only saw projections for Dems retaining control (which was high). I think GOP gaining seats was always in the cards.I think it’s interesting too how some of the qualitative predictions (like Sabatos crystal ball) were pretty close to the outcome in the Pres race.

It wasn&#x27;t that little at all. Eyeballing the 538 graph it was about a 38% chance of Republicans gaining in the house? Over a one in three chance.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;2020-election-forecast&#x2F;house&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;2020-election-forecast&#x2F;...</a>

What % chance did the polls&#x2F;forecast give the republicans gaining seats in the house (I actually don&#x27;t know but from reading pundits it sounds like very little)?  I think the interesting thing this cycle is betting markets were pretty much also at odds with pollsters&#x2F;forecasts on Trump&#x27;s chances, basically baking in a pro-trump (R?) polling error. Perhaps there really are issues with some of these forecasts &#x2F; uncertainty estimates?

I think the big issue was the &quot;margin of error&quot; in many of these cases. For example, when Quinnipiac did a poll a few days before the election [1], they said Biden was winning Ohio by 4 points with a +-2.5 point margin of error... which happened to be very far off. And this wasn&#x27;t isolated-–if memory serves me, Wisconsin was even further off?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poll.qu.edu&#x2F;florida&#x2F;release-detail?ReleaseID=3683" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poll.qu.edu&#x2F;florida&#x2F;release-detail?ReleaseID=3683</a>

I really have no idea where this idea that the polls failed comes from. There were only two bad calls this cycle and every other outcome was within the margin of error. It was pretty much the same case in 2016 where people who had no idea what they were talking about suddenly decided they were certain polling failed because they are unable to grasp the concept of margin of error and sample size.Polls can only guess about turnout and the try to work backwards from there. The turnout estimates were wrong but not shockingly so, and as a consequence a lot of polls ended up having the result be at the far end of their margin of error. Nothing went wrong. Polling is hard. Get over this idea that you can have some sort of certainty regarding an election until we actually hold the election.

I feel like everyone who&#x27;s criticing these polls is forgetting one thing: COVID. These polls can only be as good as historical elections, and there really is not a lot of data for US elections during pandemics.

It might be representative... It&#x27;s just that people didn&#x27;t want to say they&#x27;re voting for trump.

Nate Silver gave Biden a 90% chance of winning, citing 3-4 tossup and 3-4 likely states. I don&#x27;t see how his predictions don&#x27;t look reasonable. Silver gave Trump a 27% last election - that&#x27;s a very reachable percentage . Polls have considerable margin for error. It&#x27;s standard for people to take a poll result as an absolute prediction and then rail against any error but that&#x27;s not the fault of the poll itself. [2][1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;2020-election-forecast&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;2020-election-forecast&#x2F;</a>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;what-pollsters-have-changed-since-2016-and-what-still-worries-them-about-2020&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;what-pollsters-have-cha...</a>

3-4 point polling errors are relatively normal, definitely not shocking. That&#x27;s why the best forecast models still gave Trump a nonzero chance of winning even though the polls showed Biden up by 8+ points.Polling is really hard. There are fundamental problems with it that are impossible to fully solve. It&#x27;s frankly amazing that they get as close as they do.

Biden was already ultimately declared the victor.

But the polls then and now weren’t just bad, they were shockingly bad and not representative of any real population that matters in an election. I’d expect something like this from junior engineers looking at metrics for the first time, but these are supposedly the most respective organizations in their field that have failed spectacularly for the second presidential election in a row. What value do they possibly serve?Should Biden ultimately be declared the victor, I’m concerned that the public will never receive the postmortem on what went wrong and how it happened again that it deserves.

The problem that has appeared again is that without a representative sample of information gathered, it doesn&#x27;t matter how fancy your models are, you will not have accurate results. And quantifying how unrepresentative your sample is basically impossible to figure out in this situation.

Couldn&#x27;t the problem be that polling is just numeromancy dressed up in fancy math?

There is also &quot;what polls directly measure&quot; and &quot;what we infer from them&quot;.Besides the usual adjustments for likely voter models, we also do things like infer how people will vote in House and Senate elections based on Presidential polling, because we do a lot more Presidential polling than down ballot, because money.So one early thing that seems to have happened this year (and again, we are still early in the process to be making final verdicts in &quot;what happened&quot; retrospectives) is that people split their ballot more than anticipated, which means that the inferences we were making about down ballot races based on Presidential performance were off.So not quite a polling error, but an example of uncertainty that may not have been correctly taken into account in forecasting.

&lt;&lt; These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as &quot;oh yeah, polls are never perfect,&quot; you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don&#x27;t let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it&#x27;s important to talk about how.I think the complaint is that here the polls were not just imperfect. They were at best, misleading raising questions over methodology ( lessons, apparently, not learned in 2016 ), wishful thinking, and their usefulness, or, at worst, attempts at influencing desired income.I can absolutely agree that polling is not an exact science, but now it is twice in a row that polling science has grossly miscalculated the mood of the nation.

I&#x27;m on the nerd side too, but I was quite surprised. Sampling isn&#x27;t the only source of error in election polling - people also change their minds. In this election, people decided who they were going to vote for historically early - the lowest portion of people in the history of exit polls indicated they decided in the week before the election. In theory, this effect should reduce the width of the probability distribution, and yet, the polls were off again, in the same direction as they are always off, by a little bit more than average.A little scrutiny here is worthwhile. In 2016, for example, the polls were off in part because pollsters weighted the black demographic in proportion to their voting behavior in 2008 and 2012 (when a black candidate was running, boosting turnout). The actual 2016 black turnout looked more similar to 2004 or 2000 - other elections where a black candidate wasn&#x27;t running. Though I haven&#x27;t dived into the 2020 polling data, it wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if a similar effect were at play.It&#x27;s also become noticeable harder to do polling. Once upon a time, everybody had a landline, so random dialing worked really well. Now, some people have more phones than others, and people are increasingly less willing to talk to pollsters, increasing the error rate.These are all important things to talk about - when you dismiss it as &quot;oh yeah, polls are never perfect,&quot; you prematurely shut down the conversation. Don&#x27;t let perfect be the enemy of the good. The polls could be better and it&#x27;s important to talk about how.

I grew up in a right wing province of Austria and saw that sort of wrong polling throughout my youth — which is why I wasn&#x27;t surprised the slightest about things going as they did.It boils down to: a fraction of the electorate will vote for $bigotcandidate but would never ever admit it to anyone outside the voting booth, because they know it is wrong. They will tell people they will vote for $notbigotcandidate, but vote for him nonetheless.This fraction is not insignificant and you cannot easily represent it in polls without guessing the effect. In my home province it eas consistently around 10 to 15% over a decade.

The campaigns do not rely on the publicly available poll data for the reasons you pointed out - they need accurate polling in order to make serious decisions about resources. They pay polling companies to get accurate polls and they keep this data private.The publicly available polls are done for free by polling companies or by news organizations. Unfortunately some of these companies apparently have an agenda to push. So they skew their sample away from what the likely voters are to get the result they want for propaganda purposes.I think that the rise of Nate Silver has ironically made this situation worse. He advocates taking an average of polls to get a true view of the situation. So if you are skewing you poll to get a certain outcome and you know the poll will be averaged, you need to warp your results even further.Ok, disclaimer time - I don&#x27;t have any inside knowledge or real evidence of any of the above. It does seem to fit however. I can&#x27;t explain why it seems all the distorting is to make the Dems lead seem bigger than it is - that is, why aren&#x27;t there pollers on the other side of the aisle doing the same thing?So you&#x27;ll have to decide for yourself if there is any merit to the above theory.

I really want to know what went wrong with the polls (again). Shy Trump voter doesn’t explain how wrong the polls were about Graham or Collins, outside of even the margin of error.Accurate polls are important to running campaigns and to legislative positions. Selzer got her polls right in Iowa and she posited that she knew the local electorate better than other pollsters so she weighted correctly. Maybe Trafalgar Group has a better method or maybe it just weights GOP voters more heavily (we don’t know, it won’t disclose its methods). Or maybe Trump just breaks polling and the polls will be fine next time. Whatever the reason, I’d like to know, but I’m not sure we ever will.

Your coin flip analogy is spot on. But instead of a 1 in 2 probability, Trump had a 1 in 10 probability of winning. We knew this probability precisely because of polling data (and historical error).This wasn’t some rare weird outcome. This was probably a standard deviation or so closer to Trump in a forecast. Perfectly normal thing to happen.

Results fall on a spectrum from surprising to unsurprising based on the modeled prediction and confidence.

Polls are astrological race science, and the reason you&#x27;ll never be able to convince anyone of this is adequately covered by the book When Prophecy Fails. I&#x27;ve come to think that their bias is only slightly ideological, but instead springs more from a self-serving impulse to mirror the current beliefs of the audience most likely to believe in polls i.e. people overly impressed by credentials. They enjoy the sheer volume of numbers, rather than their actual usefulness.Alternate phrasings of identical questions asked in polls creates differences in outcome vastly larger than the effects they claim to detect. Somehow Nate Silver managed to get rich by selling synthetic CDOs of arbitrary polls (to people with his identical political outlook.)The only real poll is to ask the same questions, in the same way, as the ballot sheet does. Ideally these should be asked as people are entering or leaving the voting booth, and people should be paid for their responses, in order not to bias yourself towards bored loudmouths with nothing to do. This would be good for accuracy, not for usefulness in anything but generating a suspicion of election fraud.Instead, they&#x27;re trying to figure out what percentage of black people go to the polls in Missouri, and pretending that the self-selected black voter has more in common politically with the general black phone answerer than the Missouri voter. Relying on that arbitrary assumption is the entire basis of their field.edit: I haven&#x27;t read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;site.pennpress.org&#x2F;aha-2021&#x2F;9780812250046&#x2F;race-and-the-making-of-american-political-science&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;site.pennpress.org&#x2F;aha-2021&#x2F;9780812250046&#x2F;race-and-t...</a> yet, but I heard an interview with the author around the time that it came out, and it&#x27;s another hidden history of a field that has completely unearned legitimacy. &quot;Political Science&quot; might largely be considered an outgrowth of scientific racism.

What you&#x27;re saying is that any result with a non-zero chance of happening should be unsurprising to us, because it was still in the realm of possibility? If that&#x27;s the case, what use are polls? What makes an election forecast based on polls more valuable than a coin flip?

Great comment, agreed. The wonderful books from Nassim Taleb ‘Black Swan’ &amp; ‘Fooled by Randomness’ touch on this in a way that forever changed my thinking.‘We just can’t predict’.

Fivethirtyeight&#x27;s polling averaging model underestimated Trump in all the swing states. Trump wine 2-3 states predicted for Biden, and 0 vice versa. States that Biden had a supposedly strong lead in turned out to be statistical ties in the official vote. The direction bias in the polls (about 20 of 25) is obvious, it&#x27;s not symmetric random error.

Polls should say: “we’re 2&#x2F;3 confident you will win” and not “there’s a 2&#x2F;3 probability you will win”. The uncertainty is epistemological; it’s not describing a stochastic process.

I think it&#x27;s more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2&#x2F;3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9&#x2F;10?I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn&#x27;t quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it&#x27;s not numeracy, it&#x27;s epistemology.

You could also fit the same data with &quot;people polled thought they could vote until their vote was preferentially suppressed&quot;. So the polls will never match outcomes. And that it happened in the same direction two cycles in a row leads credence.(I do not know why the forecasts are wrong, but I don&#x27;t see why Parent is at all justified in his statement).

Well this measures how many people are willing to admit they would vote for Trump which is not surprisingly a lower number than people who will vote for him in an unobserved secret vote.Even if the pollsters are the most neutral nonjudgmental people on earth there will still be a fraction of the electorate that will (irrationally) shy away from telling them the truth.This effect is certainly real.

Five Thirty Eights&#x27; &quot;snake graph&quot;, which hasn&#x27;t changed since before election day, accounted for poll error successfully and predicted exactly which states would go blue and which would go red, along with which several states were uncertain. Some of the uncertains went red, others blue.  Florida was the only outlier in precisely how red it went.

if you&#x27;re a data nerd, how can you NOT be shocked by so many results falling far outside the confidence interval (often multiple sigmas), and all in the same direction?

Everytime I read a comment like this I think of that line from Dumb and Dumber:“What are the chances of a guy like you and a girl like me... ending up together?”“Not good”“Not good like one in a hundred?”“I&#x27;d say more like one in a million.”“So you&#x27;re you’re saying there&#x27;s a chance!”I know enough about probability distributions and modeling to know you can improve your models to lower that uncertainty.And sorry, you are the Lloyd Christmas in this one.

Statistics can be pretty unintuitive. On top of that, most people have never learned any statistics.

Once Biden&#x27;s team let Trump paint him as socialist I was not surprised to see the Cubanos go Trump (or the Venezuelans for the same reason) but I will be interested to see some of the breakdowns of the Puerto Rican vote in FL and some of the Central American Latino vote in Texas;  I am betting there is going to be a reasonably large gender difference in some of those groups.

Cubans are anti-Castro Republican. The young generation of pollsters forgot that Cubans aren&#x27;t just &quot;generic Hispanic&quot;.

Whats even more frustrating is recognizing the population difference in day of voters and mail in votes, expecting a &quot;blue shift&quot; as votes are counted, and then watching pundits chime in on Tuesday about surprising results.As far as I can tell the most surprising result was Trump&#x27;s popularity among Cuban Floridians.

Individual polls were sometimes outside the margin, but collectively the polls were not far off the mark and collectively they were within the margin of error.  This is why sites like 538 were able to model the various outcomes with some degree of certainty and ONCE AGAIN manage to get results within the range of expected probabilities.  You really seem to have a hard time understanding both polling and probability and in particular the relationship between sample size and error.  I suggest a bit more research.

You&#x27;re picking the easiest number to misread - the overall &quot;chance of being elected&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t really mean anything.Much more interesting are the direct results predictions, especially per state where they matter most. Those are polls that give a particular result with a +- confidence interval. If the polls were to any extent competently done, you expect the result to be well within that margin of error.The reality though has been that the results have been well outside the margin of error, sometimes multiple sigmas from the actual result - that is simply unacceptable for a poll. The only conclusion should be that polling data can be completely ignored, as it doesn&#x27;t seem to have any clear relationship with the final results.

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls&#x2F;forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen.It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.