DETROIT – The election that seemed like it would never end is, finally, over. But behind what seems like a clear and decisive result is a jagged national divide made more starkly stunning by the numbers.
More on that soon. But first — despite all the bombast and, well, lies from the White House, the electors met in their state capitals last week and cast their votes exactly the way they were supposed to – 306 for Joe Biden; 232 for Donald Trump.
The tallies were sent to Washington, where they will be formally counted before a joint session of Congress Jan. 6, and President-elect Biden is virtually certain to be certified the winner.
Some Republican members of the House of Representatives may object to accepting some states’ electoral votes — but their objections will go nowhere. Any objections can’t even be considered unless a U.S. senator joins them, and none have said they would.
Even if a senator did, it would take agreement by both houses of Congress to invalidate any electoral votes, and the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives.
Biden will become President, then, after a victory that was solid, if not a landslide. His final popular margin was just over seven million votes – 51.3 to 46.8 percent for Donald Trump.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden each won 25 states, though Mr. Biden also took the District of Columbia. But the states Democrats won had, on average, more electoral votes.
Yet the margin between the candidates was by no means distributed evenly. California is by far, the biggest state – and Biden won it by an almost unbelievable 5.1 million votes – 11.1 million to 6 million for Trump. The President-elect took New York by just under two million votes. Together, those megastates supplied all the Democratic margin in both the popular and electoral vote.
Subtract them, and the country was almost exactly divided. Trump won 64,971,257 votes to 64,941,661 for Biden in the other 48 states. But that too conceals vast divisions. Democrats won big in the Northeast and on the Pacific Coast, plus a sweeping arc of adjacent states, from Nevada to Colorado. President-elect Biden also took, as successful Democrats have before, a big chunk of the Upper Midwest.
President Trump won pretty much everywhere else. The one anomaly was Georgia, where changing demographics and Democrats’ superb job getting out the African-American vote gave Joe Biden a narrow win. Arizona was another rare close Biden win in a formerly Republican state, though in that case Trump’s repeated trashing of the late beloved U.S. Sen. John McCain and the McCain family’s loud support of Biden may have meant the difference.
But few states were close. Biden won three other states by more than a million votes each — Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland. In those last two states, Trump got less than one-third of the vote, and he got less than that in Vermont.
However, Biden got barely a quarter of the vote in West Virginia and Wyoming, and less than a third in Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Idaho. Most other states were also one-sided blowouts.
Even within states, there were huge disparities. Michigan was the closest state in the nation four years ago, giving Trump a margin of 10,704. This time, Biden won it by a relatively comfortable 154,000 votes. But his vote was concentrated in the state’s heavily populated urban and suburban areas.
In losing Michigan, Donald Trump still won 72 of the state’s 83 counties. Ohio shifted less than almost any other state. Trump won it by 8.13 percent in 2016 and by 8.03 percent this year.
Will the nation always be this polarized? Will future elections continue to come down to no more than six or eight swing states, with all the others written off by one side or the other?
You never know, but alignments change. Back in the 1980s, California was a reliable Republican state. Democrat Jimmy Carter won Ohio and Texas but lost Illinois.
Virginia, which was solid red in the 1990s, is now probably safe for any Democratic presidential candidate. West Virginia was once so Democratic that even Ronald Reagan lost it. Democrats can’t win a single county there today.
Ohio and Illinois are both large Midwestern states, and in close elections in the past often voted similarly, but they are very different now. Ohio seems to have become a safe Republican state, while Illinois is so Democratic that no Republican presidential candidate has even made an effort there since the 1980s.
There was a lot less demonizing of the opposition in those days. It was a happier time. When President Gerald Ford lost in 1976, he at least could take pleasure in his University of Michigan football team’s 22-0 thrashing of Ohio State a few weeks later.
This year, thanks to COVID-19, there wasn’t even a game.
But there is a little good news about the electorate itself: Despite the pandemic, we had the highest voter turnout since the 19th century –66.7 percent of eligible voters. (Turnout in Ohio was 67.4 percent; in Michigan, it was 73.9)
More than 158 million people voted, and most experts, including U.S. Attorney General William Barr, agree there was no detectible fraud, few glitches and an overwhelmingly successful election. Americans disagree, but they seem to care about voting more than ever, and that has to be a hopeful sign for democracy.
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