In the end, it seems, everything will come down to a few states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The 2020 election, which remains undecided, was expected to hinge on the battlegrounds. But after a chaotic and catastrophic term under Donald Trump, especially with nearly a quarter of a million Americans dead in the past year thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, even some who still suffered from 2016 shellshock had allowed themselves to entertain thoughts of a decisive Joe Biden victory. If the prospect of 400,000 dying by year’s end due to Trump’s mismanagement can’t convince someone to pull the lever for the other guy, after all, will anything? Swing states would be crucial, sure. But wasn’t it possible that enough people had seen the light to give Biden and Kamala Harris a bit more of a cushion?
As it turns out, no. Election night wound up being a testament to how little the reality of the past four years—or even the reality of the past 10 months—has moved the metaphorical (and literal) needle. It was a testament to how divided the country remains, not just politically, but on the matter of reality and what were once considered shared values. In this unprecedented election, with an unprecedented incumbent, this is about all that seems clear: Democrats seem poised to retain control of Congress. Republicans could hold onto the Senate. The contest between Trump and Biden is a jump ball, with the states that will ultimately decide it all still tabulating their votes.
And so the United States remains precariously balanced between two wildly different futures: another four years hostage to Trump’s whims, or a restoration of more traditional American leadership under Biden. The latter held a steady lead in polls for months, including in swing states. Some seemed to pan out Tuesday; Fox News called Arizona, once considered a reliable Republican stronghold, for Biden. But the blue wave that Democrats had hoped for and Republicans had feared didn’t quite crest, at least not Tuesday. Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham fended off challengers to hang onto their seats, and Trump won the traditionally red states and friendly battlegrounds he needed to to strike fear into the hearts of his opponents. But Biden, in a short speech to supporters, expressed hope that the presidential race would at least go as planned. “We feel good about where we are,” he said. “We really do. We believe we’re on track to win this election.”
Trump, however, prematurely declared victory, rattling off “wins” in states that haven’t been called, such as Georgia and North Carolina. “Frankly, we did win this election,” he claimed, adding that a “major fraud” had taken place. From the White House, Trump framed continuing to count votes as disenfranchising his supporters, when, in fact, stopping ongoing tallies would be the disenfranchisement. “We want all voting to stop,” he said, vowing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. The president’s anti-democratic tirade in the wee hours Wednesday followed he and his party’s efforts to undermine mail-in voting, and his encouragement of supporters to engage in voter intimidation tactics at the polls. And there has long been the possibility that Trump would prematurely declare himself the victor before the results are finalized, or challenge the legitimacy of results that are unfavorable to him. He has repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and has suggested on numerous occasions that not announcing a winner on Election Day would be evidence of fraud. “Must have final total on November 3rd,” he tweeted last week. On the night of the election, he once again baselessly accused his opponents of wrongdoing. “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” Trump tweeted as votes were being tabulated. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Poles [sic] are closed!” He seemed to declare victory in a later tweet: “A big WIN!”
There is no reason for a winner to be declared on election night as votes are still being tallied, and there is nothing inherently wrong or nefarious about the current uncertainty. While the media typically projects a winner sometime on election night, and a candidate may concede, elections aren’t finalized until electoral votes have been cast in December and certified in January. In insisting that a winner be called early, Trump is pushing to have mail-in ballots, which appear to have come more from Democratic voters this cycle and often take longer to count, thrown out. Disturbingly, the conservative Supreme Court has given indications it might share his view; concurring with a ruling last week that nixed Wisconsin’s efforts to expand vote by mail, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh wrote that extending the ballot receipt deadline could prevent states from “definitively [announcing] the results of the election on election night” and “potentially flip the results of the election.” It was an absurd argument—states don’t call elections on the night of the election; the results of an election that isn’t over cannot be “flipped”—but it could lay the legal groundwork for Trump’s pending challenges.
The threat of an election meltdown was just one of the issues looming over this race. The 2020 cycle has played out against the backdrop of a once-in-a-century pandemic—which has killed more than 225,000 Americans, taken a sledgehammer to the U.S. economy, and tore through the already threadbare social safety net—and an overdue national reckoning over systemic racism and police brutality. Those issues have both heightened the already sky-high stakes for the race, and at times directly impacted the campaign, as was the case when Trump, who has consistently downplayed the threat of the virus and thumbed his nose at public health precautions, was sickened with COVID-19 himself and briefly hospitalized. The president getting infected with a deadly virus he’d minimized just over a month before the election and getting choppered to Walter Reed on live television was absolutely wild, but only a couple shades more surreal than some of the other twists in the final months of the race: an excruciating and psychedelic performance by Trump in the first debate that left some observers wondering if the format itself should be eliminated; the president’s superspreader campaign rallies; Rudy Giuliani and a computer repairman peddling suspicious corruption charges against Hunter Biden; and, of course, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the GOP’s grotesque, hurried confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.