The 3 Key Questions for Election Day

By Yuval Rosenberg

The 3 Key Questions for Election Day

We’re almost there. After all the campaign drama, speeches,
claims and counterclaims, we’re just hours away from Election Day,
when the final votes will be cast — if not counted. We may not know
the winner by the end of the night, but here’s what you need to
know to get through the day.

Who’s going to win? Forecasters say former vice president
Joe Biden has the edge, with the
FiveThirtyEight model giving him a roughly 90% chance of
victory and The
Economist giving him a better than 99% chance of winning
the popular vote and a 96% chance of winning the Electoral College.
But as FiveThirtyEight notes, those forecasts could still be
wrong:

“What’s important to remember is that Biden is favored, but
there is still a path for Trump. Trump might be the underdog, and
he needs a big polling error in his favor,
but bigger polling errors have happened in the
past. A 10 percent chance of winning, which is what our
forecast gives Trump, is roughly the same as the odds that it’s
raining in downtown Los Angeles. And it does rain
there.”

And Zeynep Tufecki, the University of North Carolina sociologist
who The New York Times
recently said “keeps getting the big things
right,” warned in a
Times op-ed this weekend that, given all the
uncertainties around this year’s voting, from the pandemic to polls
to questions about turnout and vote counting, the models used by
these forecasters are less
useful than in the past — “and may even be harmful if
people take them too seriously.”

So if you haven’t done it yet, vote. And then, hard as it may
be,
don’t stress out about the results — or at least
realize that your stress isn’t going to change anything.

When will we know the results? We may know the winner by
early Wednesday. Or we may not — and,
despite what President Trump says, that’s ok. As
Nicholas Riccardi of the
Associated Press explains, that would not
necessarily mean that anything is “broken, fraudulent, corrupted or
wrong.”

As Maggie Astor writes at
The New York Times, “No state ever reports final
results on election night, and no state is legally expected to.
Americans are accustomed to knowing who won on election night
because news organizations project winners based on partial counts,
not because the counting is actually completed that quickly.” This
year, with millions more Americans having voted by mail, news
organizations that track vote counts may need more time to be able
to project a winner.

“In some states — like Colorado, which has been conducting
elections by mail for years, or Florida, which allows officials to
begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day — it may still
be possible to call winners on election night, depending on how
close the races are,” Astor writes. “But in many other states —
including the all-important Pennsylvania, where some counties will
not begin counting mail-in ballots until
Nov. 4 because of limited resources — it could take
several days to get an accurate picture. If this happens, it will
be evidence not of a conspiracy but of the electoral system working
as it should, by counting every vote.”

What could go wrong? Oh boy. Do you really want to know?
The list of possible risks is long, with fears percolating about
anything and everything from
technological problems to legal disputes to
violence in the streets. One candidate or the other (read: Trump)
could
declare victory before the results are known or

challenge the legitimacy of certain votes or the
outcome, potentially setting up even more
extreme scenarios for how the election could be
contested. Let’s all hope for the best, but if you want to mentally
prepare for the worst, you can read more
here,
here or
here.

Post-Election Gridlock Could Scar the
Economy

Even after the election, the nation could face a prolonged
stretch of political gridlock that further delays another
coronavirus relief package even as the economy faces additional
pain.

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein
reports that a number of economic sectors are
preparing to be hit by the surge of Covid-19 cases and the arrival
of winter, with some 40% of restaurant owners across the country
saying in industry surveys that the expect to go out of business by
March without more aid. The travel and hotel sectors also face
severe strains.

At the same time, millions of Americans “are also at risk of

having their power and water shut off with unpaid
utility bills coming due, while protections for renters, student
borrowers and jobless Americans will expire by the end of the year”
unless Congress can pass additional relief legislation.

“I don’t think the biggest risks are common or national-level.
The biggest risks are specific geographies and specific parts of
the population,” said economist Ernie Tedeschi. “But the pain for
those segments could be very deep.”

Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, a
right-leaning think tank, told the Post: “All signs suggest that
we’re in for the worst of this at the same time the situation in
Washington is also becoming its worst and most horrible.”

What will Trump do? “Among the biggest mysteries hovering
over this uncertainty is what Trump and his aides will do after
Election Day, particularly if he loses to Democratic nominee Joe
Biden,” Stein writes. “There are almost three months between the
Nov. 3 election and the next inauguration on Jan. 20 —
approximately the period of time when both public health experts
and economists fear the coronavirus will strike the nation with
renewed ferocity. As colder weather pushes people indoors, the
Trump administration has not outlined a plan for how to deal with
an expected surge of cases and hospitalizations. … Several former
White House officials and numerous Republican aides on Capitol Hill
said they believe it is possible the president loses interest in
the stimulus package once it has no utility for his 2020
presidential campaign.”

Another wave of job losses: “We are about to see a second
wave of job losses — this one more likely to permanently push
millions out of the labor force, lower wages and leave long-lasting
scars on the economy,” writes Dion Rabouin at
Axios. Rabouin notes that a number of large
corporations have announced thousands of layoffs recently. “Rather
than a panic-driven effort to cut costs and stay above water, these
job losses are largely a result of companies reducing headcount
after mergers and acquisitions or as part of a longer-term
strategy,” he adds.

The bottom line: As Axios’s
Dan Primack sums it up, “With less than 24 hours
until Election Day, there's one truth that applies to every federal
elected official running for re-election, from President Trump to
the furthest backbencher in Congress: They failed to produce the
economic stimulus that almost everyone agrees is needed, including
a second wave of PPP loans.”

Pelosi’s Plan to Pass a Coronavirus Relief Bill — and More

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Monday that Democrats may
seek to use budget reconciliation to provide more funds for
coronavirus relief and economic stimulus, as well as to enhance
Obamacare.

“We’ll almost certainly be passing a reconciliation bill, not
only for the Affordable Care Act, but for what we may want to do
further on the pandemic and some other issues that relate to the
well-being of the American people,” Pelosi said in a meeting with a
progressive group,
Politico reported.

Democrats could proceed with budget reconciliation if they
were to win control of the White House and both houses of Congress.
Legislative rules allow for the passage of a spending package
through the Senate once a year with a simple majority vote,
avoiding the potential snare of a filibuster, which requires 60
votes to end.

Judge Blocks ‘Public Charge’ Rule for Immigrants

A federal judge has
halted an effort by the Trump administration to
deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits such as food
stamps, Medicaid and housing assistance.

U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman on Monday struck down
the rule, saying that, among other issues, it violated the
Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the process for
creating new rules at federal agencies.

The Trump administration’s rule change was the subject of
numerous legal challenges. Officials in Chicago said the new rule
would result in some immigrants avoiding necessary medical care for
fear of being branded “public charges” and thereby losing access to
residency.

“As we all continue to be impacted by COVID-19, it is
vital that no one is fearful of accessing health care,” Cook County
Board President Toni Preckwinkle said in a statement. “The court’s
decision to block enforcement of the Public Charge Rule re-opens
doors for immigrants to access vital services like health
care.”

Officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and
U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services have not indicated
whether they will appeal the ruling.

Joe Biden’s Economy Czar

Joe Biden has a vast team of advisers working on plans to boost
the economy in the event that the former vice president wins the
presidential election. While some are big names who served in the
Obama administration, a
report in The New York Times Monday says a relatively
young and little-known tax and budget expert named Ben Harris is
coordinating the Biden campaign’s economic platform, and the
policies he is crafting could play an important role in managing
the economy starting early next year.

Finding compromise: The challenge for Harris, who serves
as the Biden campaign’s senior economic adviser, is to balance two
important but divergent interest groups in the Democratic Party:
progressives, many of whom think President Barack Obama was too
timid when it came to combating the Great Recession, and
business-oriented centrists who worry that left wing of the party
will be too aggressive in its efforts to repair a pandemic-ravaged
economy in 2021 and beyond.

According to the Times’ Jim Tankersley, Harris has successfully
threaded the needle between the groups, crafting proposals for the
tax hikes and increased spending progressives want in ways that
centrists can accept and even embrace.

“The economic agenda Mr. Harris helped craft includes income and
investment tax increases on top earners, higher taxes for
corporations and a variety of spending increases in areas like
clean energy, infrastructure and higher education,” Tankersley
writes. “While those plans remain far less aggressive than the
tax-and-spending ideas of Mr. Biden’s more liberal primary campaign
rivals, he has managed to avoid sharp criticism from the
left-leaning economists who have pushed for historically large tax
increases on corporations and the rich.”

Gathering support: In addition to pleasing the
progressive wing, the compromises Harris has wrought have been
embraced by Wall Street, which has poured money in the Biden
campaign, and the general public, which generally approves of
higher taxes on the wealthy and increased spending on public
goods.

Harris’s policies also tend to play well with the budget
models that can make or break a policy proposal in Washington. The
personal income tax hikes Biden has proposed, for example, are
similar to those proposed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,
but are structured within the existing tax code and come at a lower
economic cost. That could help a potential Biden administration get
its agenda through Congress as it takes up the fight against the
coronavirus early next year.

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