Election night has turned out exactly as many pundits and analysts predicted — at least in one respect: There's no clear winner as of early Wednesday morning in the US. Key battleground swing states including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are still in play and will likely take some time to report full results.
Unsurprisingly, both candidates did their best to ignore the up-in-the-air situation and projected optimism to their supporters. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden made an appearance early Wednesday morning local time in his home state of Delaware.
"We knew this was going to go long," Biden said, adding that he felt good about where they were in the race to reach 270 electoral college votes to secure the presidency.
"It ain't over until every vote is counted, until every ballot is counted," he emphasized.
With three different kinds of votes: in-person voting on Election Day, in-person early voting, and mail-in ballots, the counting process can stretch well into the following days.
This is a totally legitimate part of the democratic process. Seeing President Donald Trump describe it as Democrats trying to "steal" the election, as he did on Twitter early Wednesday morning without providing evidence, shouldn't come as a surprise but it's still infuriating.
In his speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump claimed to have clearly won several states that, at that point, still hadn't counted enough votes to call a winner. He specifically pointed to his lead in Pennsylvania, without talking about the very important detail of what kind of ballots are yet to be counted there.
Many of the ballots still outstanding are mail-in ballots, which experts assume Democratic voters cast more than Republican voters. So of course Trump wouldn't want them counted. But this also means that Democrats shouldn't give up hope yet — Trump might be in the lead in many of the states still open, but a large number of the votes still to be counted are likely going to be for Biden.
In other words, while it might feel like a depressing 2016 déjà-vu right now, not all is lost yet. But Trump declaring victory, calling the counting process a "major fraud," and announcing that he would call on the Supreme Court displays a brash disregard for the way votes are tabulated in a democracy in the pandemic year 2020.
Not enough Americans appalled by Trump's actions
Many liberal Americans had hoped for a clear-cut Biden win — and certainly not an election race this close. After all, their candidate ran against a president who wanted to ban Muslims from entering the US, who separated migrant children from their parents at the southern US border, who has launched racist attacks against US Congresswomen, who was impeached for attempting to trade military aid to Ukraine for help against his political rival, under whose leadership more than a quarter of a million people died in the COVID-19 pandemic so far… The list goes on and on.
The fact that a significant number of Americans still voted for Donald Trump despite his actions over the past four years shows what is acceptable in the United States. And that is devastating, no matter who ends up in the White House.