This election will take a while to process, and it may not even be until after we get the results of Georgia Senate runoff elections before we understand the full story of what the voters are saying. A few more thoughts are worth passing along, though:
•The Constitution, in Article II, dictates the method of choosing a president: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress." In other words, it's not up to the Associated Press, or to President Trump, or to Nate Silver, or the Fox News Channel decision desk, or the one at ABC News, or even the courts, to name the president. It's up to the states, and up to the electors they choose by the manners directed by their legislatures themselves. The Constitution goes on to say that "The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States."
•Trump-Pence may be the last time we see a major-party ticket in a U.S. presidential election that consists of two white males.
•The people dancing in the streets at a Biden victory may find themselves disappointed when the end of the Trump presidency does not immediately cure all of America's problems and the world's problems. The last time Joe Biden was in the White House, ISIS was beheading Americans, the U.S. government was shipping unmarked cargo planes full of cash to Tehran, the Syrian regime was using chemical weapons on its own people with impunity and creating 10 million refugees, there were extended street protests against allegedly racist policing in Ferguson, Mo., and there was an epidemic of opioid abuse. Biden voters may claim this is a straw man and that they never believed that getting rid of Donald Trump was going to solve everything. Doubtless, like Obama blamed George W. Bush for everything that went wrong in the first few years of the Obama administration, the Biden camp will do plenty of blaming Trump (or blaming the obstructionist Republican Senate, if such a Senate eventually materializes). But "Happy Days Are Here Again"? We'll see. I certainly wish the president success in improving America and the world. But some of these are tough, longstanding problems that, as Trump pointed out during the campaign, Biden had not fully solved during his prior nearly half-century in Washington.
