Destroying democracy one day at a time
By 
Following up on Scott’s post from yesterday, the failure to call the race by the major networks is now entering complicity with Republican propaganda strategy, if it isn’t there already.
Biden has a 7,200 vote lead in Georgia with essentially all the votes counted (there are a few thousand outstanding ballots but there’s no reason to believe they’ll break strongly one way or another, and Trump would have to get essentially all of them even to make the final tally close). Recounts almost never change the final vote tally by more than few hundred votes. Biden has now won Georgia, period.
There is no chance that Trump can win Pennsylvania. This fact BY ITSELF ensures Biden’s victory, without reference to anything else.
There is almost no chance that Trump can win Arizona or Nevada.
Biden has won 306 electoral votes — the same number Trump won in 2016 — and he’ll win the popular vote by seven million, instead of, like Trump in 2016, losing it by three million. And he won the tipping point states by considerably larger margins than Trump won the tipping point states four years ago.
For people arguing this is a “business decision” on the part of the media, where was that same decision four years ago, when the argument for calling the race for Trump was actually quite a bit weaker?
The 2016 race was called by everybody on Tuesday night. Republicans were frothing at the mouth because Hillary Clinton hadn’t conceded by 3 AM.
Al Gore conceded the 2000 race when he was trailing by 500 votes in ONE decisive state (This was of course a massive mistake, but it just illustrates what the double standards have been and are today).
So now we have a narrative about a “controversial” election, when as a functional matter the presidential election would have been decided in a completely definitive way FOUR DAYS AGO if we had a functional democracy.
This is what Republicans want, and this is what the media are giving them. Republicans can’t win national elections in America in 2020 with a minimally functional democracy, so they’re willing to do almost anything to ensure we don’t have one. And they’re succeeding.