I really think adding little adjectives like that undermines the respectedness of the NYT
It wasn't all that close. Of six elections (including this one) since 2000, at least 3 and possibly 4 (votes are still being counted) were closer in popular vote, and 3 were closer in electoral vote (based on what has been called so far, regardless of how the uncalled states go.
But it was particularly actively contested, with both high turnout and high passions on both sides, which is exactly what “tumultuous” means.
The fact some previous was closer, doesn't mean this one wasn't close, not sure how we even need to point this out on a site like hackernews.
We didn't wait for days because it was close; races which were much closer were called much sooner.
We waited because calls are made by projections, which are based on statistical extrapolation, which are sensitive to patterns of comparable comparable ballots, and the high mail in count and partisan divide in mail-in ballot usage made projection much more difficult than it normally is.
> Biden has ~50.6%, if that's not close I don't know what is.
A >3 percentage point margin isn't close by standards that make any sense applied to US Presidential elections.
That said, even if it was particularly close, the bigger point is that that wouldn't be evidence that it wasn't tumultuous, since “tumultuous” isn't in any way opposed to “close”. That it also wasn't particularly close is a secondary issue.
Furthermore tumultuous does not equate to unpopular. Perhaps his supporters enjoy the chaos.
There is no doubt that Trump's presidency was tumultuous and there is no doubt that the race was indeed quite close.
Any choice in publishing one news is simultaneously an active a choice in not publishing another. Furthermore, there is not one singular truth to report in the vast majority of news, in particular of political nature.
The solution is not to find another news outlet that feels more like truth. Instead, find a few different news outlets and understand their biases.
News and media has manufactured consent and outrage since their inception.
They're directly responsible for uncovering heinous crimes and for causing them.
Over 70 million people voted for Trump. If you hand-wave away his popularity and call all of them bigoted, then you are part of the partisan problem in our country.
As anarchists march in Portland, Miamians are worried about socialism.
Secular policies dominate in California and New York, while religion is invoked by close to every Southern Senator.
The HN guidelines do say politics should be considered off-topic: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
There's a ton of duplicate (even if separate URLs) submissions.
Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
[flagged] Joe Biden is the president-elect of the U.S. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967
That may be why.
My best understanding is this is not really settled yet. I'm guessing this may be a contributing factor to why some people -- not me -- are flagging these articles.
Articles get flagged by users. Unless someone doing the flagging is willing to speak up, speculation is all we really have and even having some people speak up doesn't mean we know all the reasons why people choose to flag a piece.
I can not help but feel that Trump supporters are brigading these threads and actively trying to bury them. The fact that only old enough accounts can downvote means these are experienced HN contributors. Unsettling, really.
Is this the model of government that the USA bomb other countries for?
Also, the “red team” has been actively helping expand voter access all over the country. The Republican Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican state legislature played a major role in expanding voter access in Georgia the last couple of years (obviously they’re the ones with the actual power to change the election laws): https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/vote...
> Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the increase in registered voters shows the success of automatic voter registration and highlights other ways election officials have improved voting access, such as absentee voting for anyone who requests a mailed ballot and three weeks of early voting.
If it were not for the pandemic I'm convinced the Trump turnout for this election would have produced results rivaling Reagan in 1984. Even with a pandemic he was able to drive more voters to the polls on election day than any point in American history.
I won't comment on whether the US is red or blue or purple.
However, it's quite clear that the Trump administration specifically and the Republican party in general have been engaged in actively suppressing voters in general, and the democratic party's electorate in specific.
We're talking about an administration that, while fully aware that there was a disproportionate and significant amount of pro-Democratic party voters who depended on mail-in ballots to cast their vote, they did their best to:
* sabotage the USPS's ability to process and ship mail up to the election,
* enforce rules refusing to account for all mail-in ballots,
* and prop up their own electorate to vote in person to avoid the risk of their votes being filtered out by their sabotage campaign.
We're talking about a campaign designed to filter out votes to competing candidates, hoping to skew election results in your favor.
This is not how a party that values basic democratic values operates.
The financiers of the right are increasingly open about not wishing for a democracy in the US. The similarity here with the industrialists during the Weimar Republic is by the way striking.
What I see is 4 million more votes for Biden than Trump. In any other electoral system this would have been a rout.
No legal process has taken place that has declared Biden the winner.
He's been literally throwing lawsuits around to stop different states from continuing the counting. That to me says OP's words were accurate.
No electors have been selected yet.
Everything else that happens are formalities, however important and necessary. Other than the 2000 election, we haven't waited this long to announce the next president following a presidential election.
And it isn't even close, Biden has more differential votes by percentage than Nixon, Truman, or Reagan.
edit: so i've now been rate limited for posting three things. What the posters beyond assume is not what I meant. I'll not be able to answer for about two days or so. nice
Democracy was stress tested, and it still worked.
The fake allegations of voter fraud and the extensive efforts to suppress votes will damage future elections. And the presidential election survived attacks, but the senate could be impacted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/07/re...
edit- spelling.
Bait him out with a cheeseburger !
Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss
-The Who
Biden is not President-elect. The President is elected in mid December by the electoral college.
Tens of millions of people are about to get a crash course in civics.
Guess they're also blind to that one aren't they?
This is why they are completely immune to accusations of hypocrisy.
All told by the end of Tuesday he was down in 30+ states (as it is settling now, he's down in 38 states compared to his 2016 margin). He won PA, MI, and WI by less than a point each in 2016. So if Trump was seeing shifts of 3 away from him in Texas, it didn't take a psychic to know he'd be losing those states he won at such a small margin.
If you looked at the numbers in PA on Wednesday morning, what you saw were tons out outstanding ballots in Lehigh, Bucks, Monroe, Philadelphia, and Allegheny counties, all counties that went for Clinton in 2016. You combine that with the fact that Democrats returned mail-in ballots at a rate of 65% compared to 23% for Republicans, and this thing seemed inevitable since about Wednesday morning.
Not a true statement I'm afraid. Look at the number of votes he got. Trumpism isn't going away any time soon.
>Not a true statement I'm afraid. Look at the number of votes he got. Trumpism isn't going away any time soon.
Tumult(n.)[0]:
"1. violent and noisy commotion or disturbance of a crowd or mob; uproar: The tumult reached its height during the premier's speech.
2. a general outbreak, riot, uprising, or other disorder: The tumult moved toward the embassy.
3. highly distressing agitation of mind or feeling; turbulent mental or emotional disturbance: His placid facade failed to conceal the tumult of his mind."
I imagine that many on every side would agree with that statement.
I would assume that most of his bluster about actually winning is aimed more at casting doubt on this in the minds of his followers than any realistic hope of overturning the process.
If you are in a position with experience and financial comfort to serve your country with regards to science and technology, the Biden administration will almost certainly be a great place to land. Look for policy and leadership positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
I'll be submitting my resume and cover letter just as soon as the transition team site opens.
e: I will concede that it is not "quite distant", though it may not end up close in the EC when it's all said and done either.
California, for example, has only counted 77% of their votes. New York has counted 84%. Illinois has counted 89%.
I just caught the end of some discussion of this on NPR. Based on the number of votes left to count in the various states and how they are expected to turn out, there is a good chance it will end up at around 8 million.
Also, it probably makes more sense to look at it out of the number of voters, or the number of people who could have voted, rather than out of the whole population.
> Biden is likely to wind up with one of the higher percentages of votes as a share of the U.S. population that we’ve seen in a long time
Referencing this tweet, text copied below as well https://twitter.com/jtlevy/status/1324408585590329345
[credit: Jacob T. Levy]
vote share * turnout
Reagan 1984: 53.3*58.8= 31.3%
W Bush 2004: 50.7*56.7=28.7%
Obama 2008: 52.9*58.2=30.8%
Biden 2020, estimated: 51*66 = 33.7%
counted so far: 50.5*60.3=30.4% (as of 2020-11-05)The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.