The 2020 US election is a cliffhanger like no other. It was reminiscent of the 2016 election but Tuesday night’s ordeal was several notches worse for the Democrats. The mainstream media pollsters had regularly hyped the results of their prognostications based on their elaborate and scientific surveys, framing the expectations of many. The polls were simply a letdown. If the pollsters appeared in Donald Trump’s reality television show, they would have been fired! To the Democrats’ disappointment, the prediction of a blue wave turned out to be a scattered ripple. The Senate Republicans will maintain their majority while the House Democrats will lose a few seats. There goes the idea to increase the membership of the US Supreme Court.
Yet it appears that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have a clear path to getting 270 electoral votes. In winning Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, and by holding on to Nevada, a state with six votes which Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and where Biden/Harris appear to be comfortably ahead, the Democratic ticket can reach the electoral college threshold. So even if they lose the 20 votes of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and concede the electoral votes of Georgia and North Carolina to President Trump and Vice President Pence, Biden/Harris will still get to achieve their goal. It will literally and figuratively be by a hair line.
Some US political trivia. 48 states award all of their electoral votes to the candidates who obtain the majority (50 percent+1). But two states, Nebraska and Maine, allow for a split electoral vote.
In particular, Nebraska awards two of its five electoral votes to the statewide winner, with the remaining three votes going to the popular vote winner in each of its three congressional districts. Trump/Pence won all of Nebraska’s five electoral votes in 2016 but in 2020, Biden/Harris were able to flip the state’s 2nd Congressional District which includes Omaha and its suburbs. So while the Trump/Pence ticket won the 2020 statewide Nebraska vote by 59 percent-39 percent, it only gained four out of the five votes. Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District is that tiny oasis of blue amidst a sea of red states in the US electoral map. It is this one Nebraska electoral vote which will push Biden/Harris to reach the magic number of 270.
Indeed, Trump/Pence retained Florida, Ohio and Texas and were leading in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin during election night. But the Biden/Harris tandem slowly but surely caught up in the three rust belt states (because of the steel industry) the following morning after the mailed-in ballots from urban centers (which was predominantly Democrat) were accounted for. The laws in these three states provide that the counting of mailed-in votes can begin only on Election Day and that the in-person votes (which was the preferred way of voting for many Republicans) were to be tabulated first. This system had been explained beforehand and the Republicans had been attacking it. Yet this is the reason for the Trump/Pence ticket’s early lead.
Philippine experience
What is happening in the United States is similar to what transpired during the 2016 vice presidential contest in the Philippines between senator Bongbong Marcos and representative Leni Robredo. Leading survey firms SWS and Pulse Asia had predicted a run-away victory in the presidential contest but a close vice presidential race. True enough, the final difference in the latter was only 263,000 votes (increased to 278,000 after the Supreme Court, acting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, opened the ballot boxes and recounted the votes in the protested provinces of Camarines Sur, Negros Occidental and Iloilo.)
Marcos was leading during election night because the initial data tallied came from the Luzon provinces close to Metro Manila which were his known bailiwicks. But when results from the Bicol region, the Panay and Negros provinces and certain regions in Mindanao trickled in the morning after, Vice President Robredo caught up and was eventually proclaimed the winner by the Philippine Congress.
(Andres D. Bautista served as Comelec chairman from 2015 to 2017)