Good day, citizens, and welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with or about President Thomas Jefferson and American history.

I'm your host, David Swenson, joined by the creator of the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Mr. Clay Jenkinson.

And once again, we have a very special guest. Clay, would you care to introduce him, sir?

Joseph Ellis is with us today from his undisclosed location in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

It's the sixth day of November 2020, and we wanted to ask ourselves what just happened.

Joe Ellis is the author of more than a dozen books. He's won the Pulitzer Prize, and he's won the National Book Award, among others.

Now, here's where things stand, Joe. It appears on the sixth of November that Joe Biden will win the presidency, narrowly, but clearly.

At the moment, he's ahead in Georgia, and likely to win there. He's ahead in Pennsylvania, and likely to win there.

He's already been announced the victor in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

It appears that he will win in Nevada. We're not quite certain about Arizona, but it looks as if he will hold on there.

If so, he would have 306 electoral votes. Professor Ellis, is that how you see it?

It is. I think it's in some sense an electrically decisive victory, almost exactly the same electrically decisive victory as Trump achieved in 2016.

On the other side, I believe when all the votes are counted, that Biden will win the popular vote by between four and five million.

So you're saying that Biden is going to win decisively in the popular vote, and clearly in the electoral vote.

But I will qualify in so many of these states, the electoral margin was razor thin. I would say we have a decisive verdict on the president's election, and we are still a divided people.

Clearly, so there will be recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin, and probably elsewhere, and already the Trump administration or Trump's campaign has filed lawsuits in a range of directions.

So we don't know yet quite what is going to happen. And I let me ask you this question. Would it would it surprise you terribly if Mr. Trump wound up winning even so?

Yes, I think that's virtually impossible. I think that that would require legal decisions, which are impossible to imagine.

Most of the legal charges or claims he's made are frivolous.

The few that aren't would make a difference of a few thousand votes, perhaps in Pennsylvania, which would be insufficient to change the results in any state.

I believe that legally that this is going to be changed. I do believe, however, that politically this will produce a backlash from the Trump supporters and from the people who believe the conspiracy theories that he is proposing that this was a rigged election.

And that that will play out in a way that is ugly and unpredictable.

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