What To Expect When You’re Electing

On the Media

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How could election night go wrong? Let us count the ways. Plus, a chilling look at the QAnon rallies sprouting up across the country.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Election nightmare scenarios abound out of perhaps an overabundance of caution.
0:06.9	I do think the idea that we may not know the results of the election until December are a bit apocalyptic.
0:14.9	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
0:19.5	And I'm Bob Garfield. If and when Election Day
0:22.5	chaos breaks out on social media, expect a mess of our own making. Foreign trolls are
0:28.7	possibly going to be in there, but ultimately there's going to be a lot of legitimate voices,
0:33.1	just asking questions or flooding the zone with kind of wild claims. Plus, an electoral college fiasco, well before all our lifetimes, that almost led to a second civil war.
0:45.3	Democrats viewed this is a clear effort by Republicans to steal an election that they had won,
0:51.3	and again the popular vote argument loomed large. It's all coming up after this.
0:59.9	From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We've noticed that
1:09.4	media narratives that bubble up on election night
1:12.7	keep bubbling, even after the sun rises on a new day. Here's Democratic strategist James
1:19.3	Cardville on midterm election night 2018. Tonight, there was some hope that the Democrats
1:25.8	would have a wave election. It's not going to be a wave election.
1:28.8	Republican politicians and pundits ran with the no blue wave narrative. Even though late-counted ballots delivered big wins for Democrats in the following days and weeks, they turned out huge numbers, even though they didn't win the Senate. Now, two months ahead
1:46.6	of Election Day, we see a fixation on one particularly vivid democratic doomsday scenario,
1:53.7	a kind of counterpoint to the blue wave that has been dubbed the Red Mirage. Here's Josh Mendelsohn, CEO of Hawkfish, a political data firm.
2:05.3	We see in the data that twice as many voters intend to cast a ballot by mail than have it ever before.
2:12.0	They are disproportionately Joe Biden's supporters.
2:15.8	Mendelsohn spoke with Axios on HBO last month.
2:19.3	It's going to take a while. It might be wasted.
2:21.3	Because absentee ballots, inevitably, are harder and slower to count,
	...

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