Election 2020 (IV)

Wednesday early evening. Previous call still holds. The notable change is that WI is close enough to recount.

With the WI count nearly final, Biden’s margin looks on track for under 1%, allowing the Trump campaign to request a recount. They will. The idea is that the recount invalidates more Democratic ballots than Republican ballots. It would need to be a LOT more – Biden is up by something like 20,000 votes, more than an order of magnitude more than the difference in the Florida 2000 recount.

The other relevant state being discussed is AZ. In what I think might be a favor to the Trump campaign, AZ stopped giving hourly updates. If they had continued to do that, the state would be called by now. Instead we will have to wait until the end of the day. I don’t expect it to change much.

The one thing I see for Trump in AZ, is a big chunk of ~200k uncounted votes in the AZ-6 district, near Scottsdale. This district went Republican in 2018, 55% to 45%. On that basis, Trump might reduce Biden’s ~100k margin by something like 20k votes, lets say 30k votes to be generous — just from AZ-6. In the rest of the state, a similar analysis nets out to not much I think. However, delaying AZ buys time to prepare for a Wisconsin recount strategy for the Trump team.

MI is looking on track for a close but fairly ordinary Biden win. NV won’t report until tomorrow. I don’t see Trump having a realistic chance of taking either one of those back.

NC and GA look like Trump will hold them. PA, with all the huffing and puffing, might end up a being a Trump win. Would not surprise me. If Trump loses PA, which would also not surprise me, there is a limited chance of further legal appeal, though my feeling is the SCOTUS would avoid hearing the case any further. Or maybe they won’t. Anyway Trump would have to somehow get back 20k votes in WI for that to matter. Will he try? Probably.