Most networks’ focus was, quite properly, on whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would carry enough of the 93 electoral votes of the seven target states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, to win the needed 270 electoral votes.
However, even taking into account the likely reduction of that percentage, percentage gains in target states are mostly or all below average: only 1.2% and 1.6% in North Carolina and Georgia, only 2.0% and 2.2% in Pennsylvania and Michigan, only 0.9% in Wisconsin, and a somewhat higher but below average 2.7% and 3.8% in Arizona and Nevada, where those numbers may decline as more votes are counted.
It looks very much like he will carry all target states and win the election with 312 electoral votes, 8 more than he won in 2016 and 6 more than President Joe Biden won in 2020, when Trump lost six of the seven, carrying only North Carolina.
Once it became clear that Trump was not going to lose Iowa, despite Ann Selzer’s Des Moines Register poll, and that Harris was not going to lose New Hampshire, despite one odd poll showing the opposite, the focus remained on the seven target states, none of which got called by the networks, the Associated Press, or the New York Times until the wee hours after midnight.
Trump’s percentage rose in every state in the country, something that doesn’t always happen in a rematch or quasi-rematch of the previous presidential race (example: 1900, 1944, 1956, 1996), and the Trump percentage rose more than the national average in states with most of the nation’s non-target-state population.
The CNN exit poll reported that Trump lost Latino voters to Harris by only a 53 to 45% margin, a historic high percentage for a Republican and one that lays to rest Democratic analysts’ hopes that a rising percentage of “people of color” would provide their party with a permanent majority of the ascendant.
No comments:
Post a Comment