People are missing the point.
The issue is not whether or not Biden will win, or whether it will be close. The issue is whether he will be winning based on the votes counted
on election day. There is no indication that he will be. Republicans will be largely voting in person. Democrats have largely voted by mail. In many states, those mail-in ballots will not be finished being counted until Wednesday, Thursday or even Friday (in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania).
I see two potential scenarios.
First, on election night, Trump is leading in vote count in enough states to get him to 270, but analysts for the non-Fox news channels rely on sound analytical models of what the makeup of the outstanding mail-in ballots are likely to be once they're all counted, and declare Biden the winner of the election despite him trailing in most states in terms of votes actually counted up to that point. This could result in Trump declaring victory and accusing the media of lying and trying to steal the election, and in turn trying to throw out any remaining mail in ballots on the basis that they shouldn't count after election day.
Second, those news channels are more conservative in their projections, and simply note that all of the states in which significant mail-in ballots are outstanding and where Trump is leading but could realistically be overtaken once the mail-in ballots are counted are "too early to call". Again, if this happens, Trump could declare victory on the basis that, as he has said previously, "whoever gets the most votes on election day should be the winner", and tries to stop any further counting of ballots.
I do not see any realistic third scenario. Those are the only two likely outcomes, it seems to me, and they both lead to Trump and company doing the same sorts of things. The key point is that on election day, it is
highly unlikely that enough Biden votes will have been counted for it to be clear that he has the election won. The only way to draw that conclusion will be through the use of analytics. As my username would attest, I'm keenly familiar with the tendency of intellectually mediocre people to be suspicious of, and reject, that sort of modeling, and it wouldn't be a hard sale for Trump to make to a large swath of the American public. I would definitely not put it past him to try it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GirlySports
I could be proven wrong but I think again, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are conservative judges but I don't think they're thieves and cheats. Kavanaugh quickly corrected his Vermont piece today.
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I suppose we'll see, but I'm concerned that it could even get to a point where a SCOTUS that is packed with Trump appointed judges could decide the thing. I am not as confident as you seem to be about the result.