The Overblown Alarmism About a Trump Coup

[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.”

[Johnny2X2X]

1. If Trump knew he could steal it he would be campaigning so frantically

Trump is desperate. If the fix was in he wouldn't be so desperate and attacking Biden's kid. He'd still be doing some rallies, but not in this number.

Also, I try to stop my wife from watching MSNBC because they are fearmongering around this so much. Biden is winning and winning big, focus on that. If by some remote possibility Trump can shutdown the election and seize power by force then we already lost our Democracy 4 years ago, no sense in wasting time fearmongering about it.

This doesn't mean the Dems shouldn't have plans internally to deal with anything Trump might do, but there's no reason for the public to waste time freaking out about it right now.

[C_U_L8R]

2. It's clear he's going to lose

Even to Trump.
If we continue our efforts to get out the vote.

Less than two weeks left. The finish line is within sight. Let's do this!

[dware]

4. I absolutely love your enthusiasm!!!!

It's very infectious.

[C_U_L8R]

8. Just imagine Trumplessness... oh soooo good.

[MineralMan]

3. I just saw on local TV news that my Minnesota county

will begin tabulating mail-in and drop-off ballots today. From here on out, they'll be doing that on a daily basis, as more ballots come in. Other counties will be doing the same. The vote count will not be released until polls close on the 3rd, but they will be released as soon as the polls close.

Minnesota does elections right. We'll know the winner on election night, even though votes postmarked by Nov. 3 will continue to be counted for several days afterwards. That count will not change the overall percentages much, though, if at all.

We'll know more on election night than the naysayers are claiming.

[grantcart]

5. AZ starts counting today

[dware]

7. I took a little time off the road just so I could vote early in AZ,

of course I voted straight D and look forward to flipping AZ blue.

[Mister Ed]

6. And networks have no goddamned authority to "call" elections in the first place.

What does it mean to "call" an election? The term is meaningless.

Networks have no more authority to "call" elections than I have, but the general population seems to feel, on some gut level, that these election-night declarations by TV network are what really determines the outcome of an election. That feeling can lead to disaster, as it did in 2000.

[The Magistrate]

9. Exactly, Sir

It is mere punditry, a private prediction only, though it is made in public.

It has no authority whatever.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

10. The concern is not the networks calling the election prematurely

but more Trump calling it prematurely, which of course, isn't the final authoritative word on the matter either but him calling it for himself early and then losing later is going to create chaos and drama with his supporters. Now, that still doesn't really mean anything because it will be states counting votes and calling their own elections, so Trump has no real sway there either. It will just be him causing a lot of unnecessary drama and chaos if Biden wins. He's not going to be able to actually cling to power and doesn't even have popular support.

[MineralMan]

13. That's true, but people pay attention to those "calls."

Election results are math-based, and most people don't like solving math problems. So, very few people are doing all of the calculations that go into who wins and who loses as the count goes on. Instead, they depend on others to do that.

I expect the networks this year to take longer to announce "winners" in each state. However, they will do that announcing when their statistical folks say there is a clear winner. It's all about statistics. When looking at ballots that have not yet been counted, the statisticians look at how that has worked out in previous elections. Most often, the remaining ballots are generally close in percentages to the ballots that have already been counted, so predictions get made about who the winner is.

This year, with a heavy early voting and mail-in or dropped off ballot numbers, the states that count those ballots on election day, like my state of Minnesota, are going to provide clues that can be projected onto states that don't count those ballots on election day. Statistical trends are going to be weighed in predicting results for states that don't count those ballots until after election day.

Where races are very close, of course, it's tricky, and most networks, I'm sure, are going to not call those elections until later. So, there will be some states that don't get announced on Election night. How meaningful that will be depends on how the electoral count looks, based on states that have a more complete count on election day.

Trump, of course, will cry foul if Biden is declared the winner on election day. My hope is that the Electoral College count shows a clear winner on Election day.

[Miguelito Loveless]

11. The fear of a coup has nothing to do

with networks calling states, it has to do with the fact that Trump controls the narrative, and the press plays along. Trump will announce victories on Twitter to his legions of flying monkeys, they will believe it, and the press will begin reporting these claims, then the reports of the claims will be "edited" as declarations of victory by the media, and from there becomes a self-fulfilling narrative. Thus, they create their own reality.

The corporate media is NOT our friend/ally. They side with whoever makes them the most money, in revenue and tax cuts.

Dismissing this as "alarmist" will not change this reality.

[ananda]

12. Well, 2016 really was a Trump/Russian coup..

.. completely illegitimate.

So, I don't know, I won't feel right until Biden wins
and Dems take over the Senate.