The Overblown Alarmism About a Trump Coup [View all]

[brooklynite]

New Republic

The current spate of alarmist journalism is rooted in a widespread misunderstanding of how TV networks will call states on November 3. With Democrats disproportionately voting with absentee ballots, the fear is that the initial election night tallies will show Trump with hefty leads based solely on voters who cast their ballots in person. With on-screen network maps depicting swing states in Republican red, based on these premature returns, Trump will declare victory before most ballots for Joe Biden are counted. And the networks, led by Fox News, will go along with this Trumpian deception, leading to massive conspiracy theories and violent outbreaks when Biden belatedly takes the lead a few days later.

The biggest factual problem with this common electoral nightmare scenario is that networks have never called swing states based on fragmentary—and misleading—early returns. In fact, only two of the last five presidential elections were even decided on election night. After 2000’s long count, the cautious networks only called the 2004 election for George W. Bush at midday on the Wednesday after the election, when Ohio finally went to the Republicans. Even Trump in 2016 was not anointed as the forty-fifth president until well after midnight.

With the conspicuous exceptions of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, swing states begin counting absentee ballots before Election Day. What that means is that many mail ballots will be reflected in the counts released immediately after the polls close. This is particularly true in states that backed Trump four years ago like Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, and Georgia, all of which begin tallying absentee votes well in advance of Election Day. If Biden is winning in, say, two or three of these battleground states on election night, a second Trump term becomes close to a statistical impossibility.

Orson Welles during the downslide of his career made a series of TV ads for Paul Masson pledging to “sell no wine before its time.” That comes close to the mantra of the decision desks at all the TV networks, including Fox: “We call no state before its time.” In an online panel discussion last week, sponsored by the writers’ organization Pen America, election night data crunchers for CNN, Fox, and the Associated Press made this very point. As Arnon Mishkin, who heads the Fox News decision desk, put it, “This will be a high-visibility election, on which there will be a competition to try to tell the story as accurately as possible.”