Not close: Biden will beat Trump by almost 7 million votes!

fivethirtyeight

I was way off yesterday when I figured Biden would beat Trump by 4 million votes, which seemed like a decisive victory to me. 

Data nerd Nate Silver has a better idea of the winning margin:

Extrapolating out from current vote totals, I project Biden winning the popular vote by 4.3 percentage points and getting 81.8 million votes to President Trump’s 74.9 million, with a turnout of around 160 million. 

This is significant because no candidate has ever received 70 million votes in an election — former President Barack Obama came the closest in 2008, with 69.5 million votes — let alone 80 million. 

That may also be a slightly conservative projection, given the blue shift we’ve seen so far and the fact that late-counted votes such as provisional ballots often lean Democratic. 

I’d probably bet on Biden’s popular vote margin winding up at closer to 5 points than to 4, and 6 points isn’t entirely out of the question either.

The margin is also a bit more impressive in the context of our highly polarized political era, which has tended to produce close elections. If I’m right about the popular vote margin, Biden’s win would come via the second-largest popular vote margin since 2000, exceeding Obama’s 3.9-point margin against Mitt Romney in 2012 but lagging behind Obama’s 7.3-point win over John McCain in 2008.

The notion that the election was close was fueled by the drama of the electoral college contest that cable news covered for days after the election.

The reality: Trump and the Repugnant Party were rejected decisively by the American people.

See also The GOP’s Future Leaders Are Endorsing Trump’s Election Fraud Lie.