How "blueshift" will help Trump falsely cry "Foul" when he loses

Geoffrey Skelly of FiveThirtyEight.com has an interesting and informative piece today on how the returns are likely to come in next Tuesday and beyond in some critical swing states. Unfortunately, we can't seem to catch a break in 2020; the pattern couldn't be better designed for Donald Trump to cast doubt on the legitimacy of even a decisive defeat if he himself had designed it.

Skelly starts off with the reasonable premise that Democrats and Biden voters generally will overwhelmingly vote early or by mail, while COVID-denying Trump supporters will generally vote on Election Day, at the polls.  In some states, like Florida, this won't matter much; they're already counting early votes in Florida, and for the most part, what we see on Election Night is what we will get. If Biden wins Florida (he's up by five in the last poll I saw, but I don't trust it; my instincts tell me that it's going to be a cliffhanger), it's basically over. It's hard to see a path for President Trump to 270 electoral votes and a second term that doesn't include Florida. 

Here's a tip, incidentally: watch Sumter County. It's heavily Republican. It's hard to know what it means that it leads the State of Florida in the percentage of its population that has voted early, but insiders say that if Present Trump gets less than 65% of the vote in Sumter, he's in big trouble in Florida.

But in some critical states- Skelly uses Pennsylvania as an example- past experience indicates that not only will we not know the outcome for several days, but the apparent outcome on Election Night may well be in almost every way the opposite of the final outcome. He predicts that President Trump will run up a huge lead on Election Night, and it will look to the casual observer as if the bizarre "shy Trump voter" narrative is and the polls have proven a broken reed once again. It's worth noting that some Republican-leaning pollsters assume this and deliberately oversample Republicans! The result is outlier polls that offer psychological reassurance to supporters of the President, but the whole value in predicting the outcome of the election is negligible. There is no actual evidence that "shy Trump voters" are even a thing; it seems to be a phenomenon born of wishful thinking on the part of the President's supporters.

But what will actually be going on is what Skelly calls  the "blueshift." It's a clever pun. Blue, of course, is the color of the Democratic Party. And in physics, "blueshift" is the tendency of light to shift toward the blue end of the spectrum the closer one gets to an object ("redshift" is the shift to the red end of the spectrum as one moves away). The closer we come to the completion of the vote count, the more Democratic the outcome is likely to become because most Republican votes, cast on Election Day, will be counted on Election Night, whereas most Democratic votes, cast early or by mail,  will be counted in the succeeding days.

Pennsylvania election officials predict that it could be Friday, Nov. 6 before they finish counting all the votes; others think it could be as late as Nov. 20. But Skelly speculates- and I'm afraid the might be right- that this creates a scenario that will enable President Trump to falsely claim that the election was "rigged," and that a huge percentage of the American people will believe the lie.

In the June 2 Pennsylvania primary, 71% of the Republican votes were counted on Election Night and only 46% of the Democratic votes. If the same pattern holds next week, President Trump will appear to have a substantial lead on Election Night. But the 54% of the votes counted on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday- perhaps a majority of the total- could be from Democrats and only 29% from Republicans! There is a substantial possibility- even a likelihood- that not only will the final result be different from what it appears to be Tuesday night, but that what looks like a solid Trump victory could end up as a decisive win for Biden!

And given the identity of the current occupant of the Oval Office, that would open the door to all sorts of trouble. The problem is that the phenomenon of "blueshift" doesn't only hold true in Pennsylvania. It's also true, though to a far lesser extent, in Michigan and Wisconsin, and also in other large states, though the hodgepodge of county-level rules and regulations makes the situation in Pennsylvania particularly severe. There is a definite possibility that based on large leads in enough states to give him a majority in the Electoral College, President Trump might declare victory on Election Night. When the final result shows that Joe Biden has, in fact, been elected, he will cry "Fraud!-" and cite the very fact of the change, predictable as it is, as evidence!

And a sizable number of people would believe him.

The potential for chaos is enormous, and there can be no doubt that the President will do anything he can to cast doubt on the legitimacy of any unfavorable outcome. The period between Election Day and Inauguration Day may well be filled with lawsuits, arguments, discord, and recriminations that will make 2000 look like a lovefest. And a large percentage of TrumpWorld- which by now has formed the firm habit of believing what they want to believe, whether or not the evidence supports it- will never accept the legitimacy of a completely legitimate Biden victory.

We don't need this. It's one more consequence of our having elected a narcissist whose only agenda is his own best interests in 2016- or rather, of an accident of demographics having elected him.

Donald Trump will likely ignore the American tradition of civilized and orderly transfer of power and go whining into private life in any case. I am not afraid, as some are, that he would attempt to hold on to power even in the face of defeat; he may admire dictators and "strongmen," but he himself is too weak a man to ever try to become one himself. Besides, our institutions wouldn't permit it. The moment Joe Biden took the oath, his would be the orders the Secret Service and the armed forces would obey, and if necessary Mr. Trump would be carried out of the White House on his chair.

But I have no doubt that the man Jeb Bush well described in 2016 as "the Chaos Candidate" will sow as much chaos and confusion in his departure from office as he can. Never underestimate the disruptive potential of narcissistic rage. And the phenomenon of "blueshift" is there to help him if he chooses to take advantage of it.

Nothing in his previous behavior causes me to doubt that he will if the opportunity arises.