Much of Thursday—day three of what is fast becoming Election Week—was quiet. There were no mass protests, and, though Donald Trump’s campaign sent lawyers into courtrooms and surrogates before television cameras to challenge aspects of the vote-counting process, their critiques mostly failed to register: a Trump-campaign street-corner press conference in Philadelphia was drowned out by opponents blasting Beyoncé’s “Party.” The real action—the sorting, the tabulation—took place inside vote-counting centers in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Alaska, and, perhaps above all, Pennsylvania. There, the story was clear. The mail-in ballots, generally the last to be counted, continued to deliver large margins for Joe Biden, and, although he did not yet lead in most of the counts, he was on a clear path to victory.
Across the country, sharp differences emerged in the partisan composition of the mail-in and Election Day ballots, presumably because Democrats urged their supporters to vote by mail, in order to limit the spread of the coronavirus, whereas Republicans, who have taken a more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic, did not. In Pennsylvania, Biden was getting three-fourths of the mail votes, and Trump was getting two-thirds of the precinct votes. The looming uncertainty of the day was how long it would take for each state to be called, which was mostly a math problem, involving how many outstanding votes there were of each type and the size of the margin between the candidates. That’s not to say it wasn’t complicated. On Wednesday, Fox News and the Associated Press called Arizona for Biden, which would give him two hundred and sixty-four electoral votes, just six shy of the two hundred and seventy needed for victory. But other networks had declined to join them—largely, it seemed, because it remained unclear what types of ballots remained to be counted. (On Thursday morning, the Trump campaign sent out a petulant press release attacking a man named Arnon Mishkin, who runs Fox News’s decision desk: “Why would Mishkin put his finger on the scale for Joe Biden before so many votes are counted? Mishkin is a registered Democrat.”)
In other states, the count was trending toward Biden. On Thursday afternoon, Biden maintained a very small lead in Nevada, of about eleven thousand votes, but the ballots that were being counted were strengthening his position. Most of the rural vote was in, and more than ninety per cent of uncounted ballots came from Clark County, home to the Democratic stronghold of Las Vegas. At 1:15 p.m. on the East Coast, Jon Ralston, the most prominent political reporter in Nevada, tweeted, “I see no path left for Trump here.” In Georgia, what had been a large Trump lead was slowly, steadily diminishing, as final mail-in ballots were counted. The modellers suggested that it was likely to be extremely close, with a margin of less than half a point, which would trigger an automatic recount. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state told the Associated Press that the margin could be within a thousand votes. But the count was most dramatic in Pennsylvania, where Trump had once had a formidable lead, and which could well tip the Presidency to Biden. Noting the huge margins for Biden among the mail-in votes, Dave Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report and NBC News, tweeted, “PA is the ballgame, but at continued rates like these it wouldn’t be much of one.”
The slow drip of these results emphasized how surprisingly steady and unbothered the past few days have been. In Philadelphia and other cities, officials were preparing for the arrival of armed pro-Trump agitators, and in Washington and New York some store windows were boarded up, in case of unrest after a disputed election. But, two days after an unresolved vote, the country has been calm. Television crews, starved for dramatic images, have settled for bureaucratic ones, of election administrators sitting at long tables, masked and socially distanced, carefully, quietly sorting and counting ballots. Whose hands is this country in? Those of the voters and the elected officials. But also, in some reassuring sense, in those of the middle management. Fox News was in the hands of its news division, who have played it admirably straight on air. Republican officials, summoned before cameras, kept saying that the count should continue. Shortly before 4 p.m., as the light began to dim on the East Coast, Donald Trump, Jr., tweeted, in exasperation, “The total lack of action from virtually all of the ‘2024 GOP hopefuls’ is pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing and able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead. Don’t worry, @realdonaldtrump will fight and they can sit and watch as usual!”
Fighting meant a news conference, at the White House just after six-thirty, where Trump was blustery but flailing. He said, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” His lead, he insisted, was being “whittled away in secret.” An anonymous Trump campaign adviser had told CNN’s Jim Acosta that it would take an “act of God” to turn the election the President’s way; as Trump spoke, his Georgia lead dropped to less than four thousand votes. Kathy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State, told CNN in the afternoon that she expected the “overwhelming majority” of the remaining ballots (there had been five hundred and fifty thousand at the beginning of the day) to be counted by the evening—well ahead of schedule. Could this be the end? It was hard to believe. Whatever Trump might say, the bureaucrats have a schedule of their own.
