November in an election year usually means the dust has settled by the end of the month, but since this is 2020, anything can and will happen. President Donald Trump has yet to formally concede the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, despite every major media outlet and most battleground states’ election boards calling this one over. As it stands President-Elect Biden has 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the very same margin Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by in 2016. The following is a week-by-week recap of the November election news, which improbable as it may seem, is extending into December as Trump’s madcap legal team runs out the clock with dozens of lawsuits, most of which have been summarily dismissed by judges.
This election is over and Biden won, but those facts have been slow to be acknowledged by Trump. More than $1.5 billion has been wagered from overseas on the outcome, according to the Bonus.com US Presidential Election Odds tracker, which has been more or less a flat line since Biden was officially declared the winner on Saturday, Nov. 7. Biden sits on our tracker with a 94% chance of winning the presidency as of this writing.
Nov. 16-27
We are closing in on two weeks since Election Day, and President Donald Trump has yet to concede defeat. All states have reported their results, giving President-Elect Biden a 306-232 electoral college lead. Interestingly, it’s the exact same margin Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by in 2016, which he repeatedly boasted was “a landslide.”
Besides just being a sore loser, the Trump administration has been dragging its feet on giving Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris access to key intelligence briefings to ensure a seamless transition. This move has been condemned by current and former intelligence officials, who noted the 37-day period in 2000 between Election Day and George W. Bush being declared the winner, and the subsequent delay in starting the transition, was partly to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Meanwhile, Trump and his supporters continue to claim totally unsubstantiated and unproven claims of widespread voter fraud, despite the President’s many lawsuits being dismissed in every state he’s attempted them in. It’s clear at this point Biden’s margin of victory in states he flipped from red to blue in 2020 is too wide to be closed by a simple recount, so Trump’s strategy has been to undermine the nation’s faith in the democratic process. Considering more than 72 million Americans voted for Trump, this could have dangerous ramifications if a plurality of them ever refuse to accept the election results.
Make no mistake: This election is over. At noon on Jan. 20, Joseph Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. Despite this, sitting Republican lawmakers have been afraid to go against Trump by even acknowledging the results, anticipating a pair of runoff Senate elections in Georgia in early January that could decide which party controls the U.S. Senate. Their fear is an early indication that even though Trump handily lost the 2020 US presidential election, he and his family will continue to have significant sway over the Republican party going forward. Trump has even floated a potential 2024 run.
Nov. 9-13
America has spoken, and Joe Biden is the new President-Elect of the United States. Biden crested the 270 electoral votes mark on Saturday, Nov. 7 when Pennsylvania was called for the former Vice President, while President Trump remains at 214.
As of this writing, four states remain undecided: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. North Carolina and Alaska are leaning Trump, while Arizona and Georgia are both leaning Biden. Should the states play out as they’re indicating, Biden would have 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. It’s worth noting that several news outlets, including AP and Fox News, already called Arizona for Biden the day after Election Day.
The Trump campaign is waging numerous legal challenges to the results, and the incumbent and his surrogates have been steadily taking to the airwaves to denounce the results as a fraud. This despite none of the accusers so far producing any evidence whatsoever of widespread voter fraud. Needless to say, Trump has not conceded the race, or even spoken to President-Elect Biden, as has been tradition in the past. Few if any sitting Republican lawmakers have even acknowledged Biden’s win.
For his part, President-Elect Biden has already begun preparing his administration’s coronavirus task force. With cases surging to new highs every day, he is leveraging all available resources to ensure the administration can hit the ground running in January. In the meantime, the US is pretty much on its own, with President Trump’s coronavirus task force holding no meetings for months, even as the new daily case count has surged to well over 100,000.
Nov. 4-8
The votes have been cast, and the presidency still hangs in the balance the morning after Election Day. Hopes of an overwhelming “blue wave” never materialized, and most of the races called last night were unsurprising.
Trump captured the key electoral prizes of Florida and Ohio, but the race will be decided with a handful of battleground states that have yet to be called. This chiefly includes Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, but Arizona and North Carolina also remain to be decided. Trump declared himself the winner early Wednesday morning, despite millions of absentee and mail-in ballots yet to be counted, but news networks including Trump-friendly Fox News strongly rebuffed his claim.
Hopes the Democrats would wrest control of the US Senate away from Republicans are fading fast, and key Senate races will see some high-profile Republicans remain in their jobs. Lindsey Graham, facing a well-monied challenger in Jaime Harrison in South Carolina, wound up winning his race by double digits. In Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fended off a challenge from Amy McGrath, winning a seventh term. The Democrats did manage to flip at least two Republican held seats — in Colorado former Gov. John Hickenlooper defeated Republican incumbent Cory Gardner, and in Arizona the Associated Press has called the U.S. Senate race for Democrat Mark Kelly over Republican Martha McSally. In Alabama, Democratic incumbent Doug Jones lost his race to Tommy Tuberville, a pick-up for the Republicans.
With so much of the vote still outstanding, anything can still happen. The Bonus.com 2020 US Presidential Election Tracker swung wildly at times last night, but the momentum now among overseas election bettors is all Biden, who sits at better than 62% odds to be the winner when the dust settles.
Nov. 1-3
It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally on the eve of the 2020 US Presidential Election. Both candidates have been aggressively campaigning in key swing states in the final days, and FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate of national polls have former Vice President Joe Biden leading by 8.4% as of this writing.
Trump’s closing argument has included ramping up attacks on US doctors and scientists, claiming baselessly at a recent rally that doctors profit from increased diagnoses of COVID-19. He’s also continued pushing a conspiracy theory involving his son Hunter’s laptop and shady ties to foreign leaders, a conspiracy that has been debunked and discredited repeatedly.
What’s very real, however, is a number of troubling recent incidents involving Trump supporters. This weekend in Texas, a group of pick-up trucks clad with Trump and American flags surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 as it made its way to a last-minute campaign rally. The FBI is investigating the incident described by a Biden campaign official as attempting to slow the bus down and run it off the road.
Trump, in characteristic disdain for the democratic process, tweeted his support of the incident with the caption “I LOVE TEXAS.”
Other, similar incidents with pro-Trump vehicle convoys have taken place across the country in the last week, with supporters causing a six-mile backup on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway on Sunday. Meanwhile, Biden continues to host small, socially distanced campaign events where he continues to his his campaign messages of unity and order, not division and chaos.
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