Election 2020: Day 1, 9am

No real movement in the past few hours. However I’ve seen some analysis suggesting that WI, MI, and NV all seem likely to remain as narrow Biden victories. With that, and with AZ looking good for Biden and NE-2 in the bag, that puts the “Plan A2” 270-268 scenario in play, even if GA, NC, and PA all go south. Having said that, if we really end up at 270-268 then the entire “faithless elector” situation comes into play, as if we needed more chaos…

A friend has pointed out that in the unlikely event that MI (with 16 electoral votes) and NC (15) were to flip outcomes from how things currently look, we could still end at a 269-269 tie.

Things do not look promising, from my standpoint, for two state-level initiatives I care deeply about. First, California Proposition 22, which classifies app-based drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, appears to have passed. I’ll save my anguish over the process and outcome for some other post some other time. Second, the Illinois constitutional amendment to permit graduated tax rates is currently losing 55-45, although it’s unclear to me how much Illinois vote remains to be counted and of what type. The Illinois results reported to date seem strange to me, with Biden only ahead 55-43 and Senator Durbin only ahead 52-41, which makes me suspect there could still be a lot of left-leaning vote to be counted.

As expected, both my wife’s riding (MN-4) and mine (IL-4) have been called for the incumbent. Oh wait, we don’t call them “ridings” here, we call them “districts” – my mistake. The neighboring rid… district of MN-2, where my wife’s employer is based, has not yet been called. The incumbent Democrat, Craig, is currently ahead of her Republican challenger 49-47. Six percent of the vote went to the candidate of the Legalize Marijuana Now Party, even though he died six weeks ago; before his death he had admitted to a close friend that Republicans encouraged him to run in order to siphon votes away from Craig. Originally his death was going to cause a postponement of the election to February, and although Craig successfully sued to have the election go ahead as planned, litigation on that point may continue post-election.