Special Message - 11/3/2020

Election Update

It's just past midnight on the East Coast. Here's what we know so far tonight:

The American polling industry is broken. Either intentionally broken or out of incompetence broken. They were still showing an 8 to 10-point national lead for Biden this morning. Many pollsters were reporting a blue wave landslide. That's not happening.

Having said that, it is very hard to come to definite conclusions on exactly where we stand. None of the networks, including Fox News, are doing an adequate job of telling us how many of the mail-in votes are included in the state totals. Remember, the mail-in voting would have been significantly tilted toward Democrats.

Pennsylvania has announced that it will count no more mail-in voting tonight. Georgia has reported very little from Fulton County, using the excuse of a water main break that could take days to repair.

With all these caveats, as of now the map is beginning to look very close to the final map in 2016. The big unknown remains: Can Trump win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as he did four years ago?

The biggest disappointment and loss of the night is Arizona. That takes Biden up to 223 Electoral College votes, only 47 short of winning the White House. That means the margin of error for the president is small.

Some states where Trump is leading have not yet been called for Trump. If those states are called for him, then his most likely path to victory will be winning Pennsylvania and at least one other of the Blue Wall states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, exactly the position he was in four years ago.

Here's an encouraging sign: Blue collar counties in eastern Ohio that border Pennsylvania appear to be going strongly for Trump, just as they did in 2016. That suggests neighboring counties in western Pennsylvania will do the same.

Odds are improving by the hour that we will narrowly hang on to the Senate, which would be tremendously significant, particularly if Biden wins.

Finally, to reiterate how I started this brief update, it is almost breathtaking how wrong the entire chattering class, Wall Street, pollsters and elite opinion everywhere were about the blue wave that they imagined tonight. They were predicting a complete repudiation of conservative populism. The election has not been settled, but that scenario that was widely expected, that Republicans were facing a disaster, has not come to pass.

Just to give two more examples: They told us that the margin in Florida was razor thin. Trump appears to have carried the state by more than 400,000 votes, expanding his margin from 2016. The Washington Post told us last week that Trump was down 17 points in Wisconsin. With more than half the vote in, Trump has a narrow lead.

Keep on praying. And be prepared for the possibility that we could still have some tough days ahead before we know for sure who has won.

Thank you, once again, for your partnership with us in this battle.