Well, what do you know.
I had subconsciously assumed that Trump supporters only tolerated him because they had somehow gotten to believe that his policies would ultimately help them; or, if not, because they had bought into the glamour of his personality, such as it is! But just yesterday I got a call from a friend who lives in a rather liberal city, and she says that, watching the progress of the vote-count, Trump fans—who are a minority there, of course—are practically in tears! This is completely unexpected. I had assumed that people were only interested in Trump from a political point of view. Instead, they appear to be very hurt by the fact that Trump isn't sweeping the election. (And Trump appears to be confounded, too.)
In my own view, I thought the attraction of Trump was that he was not a Washington insider, but had spent ages deploring the actions of Congress and former presidents, and had ridden to power as the glamorous outsider, who said what he thought, and made remarks off-the-cuff, which his fans loved. His unscripted speech was welcome to those who felt put-off by the gramatically 'correct' sentences of ordinary political leaders. But the fans seem to actually identify with him far more than the rest of us imagined.
Now, carefully crafted sentences might be offputting to many, especially those to whom conventional, grammatical language does not come easy. But to the typical lawyer—most congressmen and senators, and even presidents, start out being lawyers—writing a sentence whose meaning is unambiguous is second nature. If you're writing up an international agreement, for instance, you can't shoot from the hip. So Trump's sloppy language might be refreshing, but its refreshing-ness should have worn off after four years.
If we're to have all these people who have strong emotional ties to Trump, life is going to be very difficult. I can just imagine an unending string of Trump Tweets about every little action of Congress or the Senate or the White House, which will start off being annoying, and end up being highly disruptive. This looks like the future that's facing us.
On top of all of this, Trump fans are fed an endless stream of untruths and misinformation. This is possible, because these fans do not like the Media, either. They only watch Fox News, I suppose, and listen to Rush Limbaugh, but claim to not entirely trust those sources either, but only trust Trump himself. This makes it difficult or impossible to reason with them about reality, because their own reality, roughly thrown together by Trump, has such a strong hold on their imaginations. In their minds, vote counting centers are filled with suspicious people, ready to slide in fake ballots at any opportunity. In actual fact, they are filled with very serious people, half Republican, half Democrat, who labor for hours, trying to be as careful as possible about recording the ballots. I know at least one of these people personally, and she was in physical pain, after crouching over a table from six in the morning to ten at night, working with mailed-in ballots.
The voting in every state is different, but in Pennsylvania they take elections very seriously.
Mailed ballots come in an envelope with the details of the voter written on it. All that information is recorded carefully by hand, checked against the voter rolls, in case the voter is trying to vote twice. Then the envelope is opened up, and inside is another envelope, which contains the ballot. That one is anonymous, and is put in another pile. A second pair of workers opens that envelope up, and runs it through the vote-recording maching. This machine reads the votes—scans both sides of the sheet—and stores the result. (Sometimes it rejects the ballot, which must then be re-scanned in all possible ways, backwards and forwards, etc. Very much like feeding a dollar bill into a machine in a rest area on a highway.) This proceeds as efficiently as possible, but cannot be sped up very much more.
Because of the mail-in ballots—which are being used widely for the first time, because of convenience, and the virus—the procedure is necessarily complicated.
The scanners are not connected to the election center. This is for fear of hacking. The results are called in every hour or so, which is then reported to the news services. The total ballot counts are known already, at the times the ballots are closed, by simply counting the people coming through, and the total mail ballots sent out. Only the actual votes are counted slowly. So the news services know the percentages of how many votes were counted, e.g. 86%, or whatever.
Now, there are calculations the news services can make. They set how much error they can stand, and figure out what percentage of the votes must be counted to keep the error in their estimate of the total vote below that percentage they have settled on. This part of the process cannot be easily explained to laymen; in fact, I only understand the mathematics in the broadest outline. So the news services have to wait until the probability of error in their prediction (of any particular state result) is less than, say one-tenth of 1%. Until then, all they can say is that it looks like Trump is ahead, or whatever.
Finally, the Electoral College adds another wrinkle to the mess. Trump is careful not to criticize the Electoral College, because he was convinced that it is the E.C. that allowed him to win in 2016. This year, the Electoral College seems to be giving the win to Biden, and the popular vote seems to be going to him too. There are a long list of things that Trump will love or hate, depending on the outcome of the election. His lawyers have entered lawsuits against three states. We don't know how far these lawsuits will go.
Kay
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