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Election Night: ‘Too Close to Call’?
When the Georgia General Assembly enacted new election laws in 2022, the state was targeted by a dishonest propaganda campaign led by the president of the United States. The new Georgia law was “Jim Crow 2.0,” Joe Biden said — a hateful smear for which that notorious liar has never apologized. Excuse my indignation, but I was born in Atlanta and grew up in Douglas County, Georgia, and this disgusting slander outraged my sense of pride in my native state. Yet the beautiful irony is that the new law in Georgia may prevent America from suffering another one of those “too close to call” nightmares such as was inflicted on us four years ago.
Georgia has greatly increased its early voting, and the votes that have been cast early will also be counted early, so that within a couple of hours of 7 p.m. Eastern, when polls close in Georgia, we may know the winner of that state. Depending on how Georgia goes, the winner there may be almost certainly projected as the winner of 270 Electoral College votes necessary to claim the White House. Some brief explanation of this calculation is necessary.
Georgia was one of the closest states in 2020, with Biden eking out a win over Donald Trump by less than 12,000 votes. Biden’s margin was a mere 0.24 percent of the nearly 5 million votes cast in Georgia in 2020. If the state tips even slightly toward Trump compared to four years ago, therefore, the switch of Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes gets Trump to 251 — assuming, that is, that he manages to hold on to North Carolina (a subject we’ll address momentarily). On the other hand, if Kamala Harris should win Georgia, Trump’s chances for getting to 270 Electoral College votes are quite slim.
Georgia may prove to be the true bellwether of this election, but if Trump wins the state, his margin of victory will be important in terms of showing which way things are going. Should he win the Peach State so decisively that the networks feel safe calling Georgia for Trump by 10 p.m. Eastern Time, that would indicate he’s on his way to being the next president. A slender margin — one that leaves Georgia “too close to call” late into Election Night — would suggest a nationwide nail-biter.
Here’s what everyone has known about this election all year: Seven battleground states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada — will decide the outcome. However, if you do the Electoral College arithmetic, you see that Trump gets to 270 merely by winning Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. One reason that the margin of a potential Trump victory in Georgia would be so crucial is that it would indicate how things are likely to go in North Carolina, a state that Trump won by a slender 75,000 votes (1.4 percent) four years ago. Georgia and North Carolina are likely to go in the same direction because of their similar demographics, both having large black populations — 32 percent in Georgia, 22 percent in North Carolina — and if Trump wins Georgia decisively, it’s likely he’ll also win North Carolina.
How likely is that? Well, the polls averages at RealClearPolitics favor Trump by a little more than one point in both Georgia and North Carolina. Recall that the 2020 election was shaped not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the George Floyd riots that broke out that summer. Those who’ve studied the early voting patterns have detected a somewhat lower intensity among black voters, who made the difference for Biden in both Georgia and North Carolina four years ago. It’s not just because the post–George Floyd energy has faded, but also because Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to stir much enthusiasm among black men.
And let’s face it: Inflation has hurt everybody, except perhaps the ultra-rich. On Election Night 2020, I posted to Instagram a photo of the gasoline prices at a nearby convenience story: $2.19 for a gallon of unleaded. Today, I posted a picture of the same sign: $3.19 a gallon. That’s a 46 percent increase, an annual inflation rate of more than 11 percent in the price of gasoline alone. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or Latino, male or female, inflation has eroded your quality of life the past four years, and Kamala Harris has not even admitted any share of responsibility for this, much less offered a plausible plan to fix it.
That may be the simplest explanation for why Democrats are very worried about this election. Mark Halperin has heard them bemoaning the early turnout numbers, and we are now just hours away from learning whether that will be decisive in this election.
Pennsylvania, with its 19 Electoral College votes, is the biggest prize among the battlegrounds, and we may have to wait a while to know how that one goes. However, if Trump can win Georgia and hang on to North Carolina, that puts him in position to win, and the margins in those two states could tell us a lot about which way things will go in Pennsylvania. The other day, Halperin expressed his belief that the battleground states will not be divided up between Trump and Harris, but rather will all break in the same direction. That seems like the smartest bet to me, too.
So tonight, keep a close eye on those results from Georgia, which may be decisive — and should be decided rather early in the night. All thanks to the law that Biden called “Jim Crow 2.0.”
READ MORE:
The Hero’s Journey Ends Today, But How?
Election Day Offers as Many Reasons to Believe as to Doubt
The P’nut Factor
The post Election Night: ‘Too Close to Call’? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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