The Morning After - 2020 Who Won?

 Trump has made the election closer than any poll showed.  

In Florida, the consensus of ten polls on the two days before the elections showed Biden ahead by 2.7%.  The election results, not quite complete, show Trump winning state by about 3.5%. That is a more than 6% margin of error!  

In Georgia, poll results showed a squeaker Biden victory of 0.2%.  Instead, it appears that Trump will carry the state by about 2.2%. Similarly North Carolina polls gave Biden an increasingly narrowing lead, finish with just a 0.3% lead the day before the election.  Results indicate that Trump will probably win the state by about 2%.  Neither state has been called by the major news organizations yet, but it appears Trump will win both.

One can go through all the battleground states seeing the Trump consistently beat the margin of error by several percentage points.  Since all of the margins seem to fall consistently in Trump's favor, it indicate that the majority of polling firms simply got their turnout assumptions wrong.  Of course, there will be months ahead to diagnose all that.

As of 5:00 AM eastern time, as I write this, the election is still in dispute  As I predicted, if the election was tight, the results would come down to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  Consensus polling on the day before the election showed Biden ahead in all three States:

• Wisconsin, Biden +9.2%
• Michigan, Biden +5.4%
• Pennsylvania, Biden +3.7%

Those are pretty steep numbers for Trump to overcome.  However, Trump is leading in the counts in all three of those states: 

Wisconsin, Biden +0.2%

Michigan, Trump +4.9%

Pennsylvania, Trump +12.9%

In an ordinary election year with the majority of votes counted, one would probably predict Trump the winner of both Michigan and Pennsylvania.  But for so many reasons, this is not an ordinary election year.  Most of the uncounted votes are paper mail in ballots where Biden is doing considerably better than Trump.  Michigan and Pennsylvania only have about 75% of all votes counted, most of which were in person votes, that were expected to lean Trump.  Also, many of the uncounted votes in Pennsylvania are from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh: both Biden strongholds.  It is possible the states may still swing back to Biden, but a 12.9% deficit is a big one to overcome.

Biden could still win the election without Pennsylvania, if he manages to hold on to Arizona and Nevada, both of which are still too close to call.  In Arizona, Biden leads by 5% in the count. In Nevada Biden leads by less than 1%.  So, the election is still far from over.  

States are frantically working to produce final results as Trump has called for an end to counting the rest of the votes, in defiance of all election norms.  If Biden manages to win in late counts, Trump and his supporters will complain about a stolen election, that they had won on election night and that the establishment somehow stole the election from them.

This was a story that Democrats hoped to avoid by having a result that put Biden in a substantial lead that could not realistically be question.  Once again though, Trump has defied conventional wisdom, overperformed polling results, and will likely continue the fight in the courts, in the streets, and by any means necessary.