Politics

Will a Republican senator from Nebraska be the man who hands Joe Biden the White House? Ben Sasse has tried his best to do that. Sasse easily won reelection in the safe red state of Nebraska on Tuesday, leading his Democratic opponent by nearly 30 points with 85 percent of the vote in. But President Trump has not fared so well; in fact, he lost the vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional district. Since Nebraska, like Maine, divides its Electoral College votes by district, that means Joe Biden gets an elector from Nebraska. And for that, Biden can thank Sasse, who next to Mitt Romney is the sitting Republican senator who has been most outspokenly critical of President Trump.

As I write this, the outcome of the US presidential election remains undecided. To judge by media reports, it may take days to determine who the winner is. A few quick observations: The pollsters got it wrong again. Forty-eight hours ago, the chatter was all about a Democratic landslide. Observers were confidently speculating about who would land the top jobs in a Biden administration. I don’t pretend to understand the science of polling. But I know a bankrupt enterprise when I see one. Many observers worried about a close election with no clear outcome leading to a constitutional crisis of some sort. The wilder and more irresponsible speculation imagined US troops being summoned to intervene and sort matters out. It grieves me to say that such scenarios remain possible.

Despite the suspension of vote-counting in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, President Trump leads in all of those states by substantial margins compared to the number of ballots to be counted and has almost certainly been reelected, bringing the Senate and some House gains behind him. That he has done this in the teeth of the pathological hatred of 95 percent of the American national political media and Hollywood, Silicon Valley and most of Wall Street is an astonishing achievement. One would ransack the British media unsuccessfully trying to find a trace of the fact that he has had the most successful first term of any American president except Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nixon.

As has been my habit for the last few presidential elections, the afternoon of Election Day found me in Manhattan at a discreet, semi-secure, undisclosed location for a long and thoughtful lunch. The 2016 iteration of this ceremony was exceedingly thoughtful and found some of our party pushing luncheon well into tea time. Indeed, it was about 11:30 p.m. on election night 2016 when, smiling in front of my computer, I had a call from the last hold out from our band of what Athenaeus called Δειπνοσοφισταί, 'learned banqueters’, still brightening the corridors of our place of congregation.

Pittsburgh On the eve of the 2020 election, as President Trump and former VP Joe Biden are neck-in-neck, Pennsylvania is emerging as the most significant state. Pollsters and pundits predict that, as this crucial swing state goes, so will the nation. On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s leading local newspaper, endorsed Donald Trump, the first time it has endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Four years ago, talking with Western Pennsylvanians at random revealed unlikely pockets of support for Trump. Synthesizing interviews, voter registration patterns and breaking news, I speculated Pennsylvania would pivot red — and it did.

I’m doubling down. In 2016, against virtually all of the polling data and sophisticated analysis, I predicted Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton 280 to 258. To the shock of the world, he ended up winning 304 to 277. Four years later, the world finds itself again facing an American presidential election in which the vast majority of polling data and prognosticators indicate a Joe Biden win by a fairly solid majority. At last check, the polling aggregator at RealClearPolitics puts Biden ahead nationally 51 percent to 44.3 percent and in top battleground states 48.9 percent to 46 percent, which would give Biden a 335 to 203 electoral victory. The latest betting odds show Biden favored 64.3 percent to 34.8 percent.