Welcome to the election night 2020 live blog, part three. (You can find part one here and part two here.)
Fox News polling chief and head of the Fox News Decision Desk Arnon Mishkin appeared on the network’s airwaves about an hour after his team called Arizona for Biden, and said he’s absolutely sure about the Arizona call, despite skepticism about the decision from conservatives across media and politics, including folks at Fox News.
“We made it after a half hour of debating it,” Mishkin told Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. “I’m sorry, the president is not going to win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead.”
Baier responded by saying, “100% sure? So all this pushback, you are going to say we made the right call when we made it?
Mishkin: “We made the correct call and that is why we made the correct call when we made it. I’m sorry.”
Baier: “You don’t have to be sorry. Thank you very much. We appreciate your time. Get back in there so we can make more calls.”
Below is the clip. As you can see, Mishkin seems rather frustrated with Baier’s and MacCallum’s questioning:
Fox News Decision Desk Director Arnon Mishkin doubled down on calling Arizona for Biden.
“I’m sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes to eliminate that seven-point lead that the former vice president has.”
Here are his full comments on why pic.twitter.com/0KJAdY8v5S
— Stephanie K. Baer (@skbaer) November 4, 2020
Before Mishkin came on, Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt appeared on the broadcast to defend the call.
“Look, every trap we looked at, every possible way that this could go. And if there were some way that it looked like Donald Trump was going to be able to bring Arizona in, we wouldn’t have called it. But the reality is that the margins are too significant. We feel very confident in the call or otherwise we would have made it.”
Tucker Carlson pushed back.
“There has been a great deal of pushback from the president, his staff, the governor of Arizona,” Carlson told Baier and MacCallum. “I’m not privy to the math, I’m not certain how that—even after the explanation from Chris Stirewalt—how that decision was made, so I’m sure there’s a reason for it. I don’t know what it is. I know that people are very concerned about the media in general. I think our viewers trust us, but people are concerned.”
MacCallum added: “There’s a lot of pushback. Yeah. Let’s take a look at Arizona and just put it up on the screen for everybody, because there is a lot of sentiment out there that it should not be called yet, that there’s more vote coming in. We just heard from Chris Stirewalt, who said that he believes that they stand firm on that call. And I think there’s only about 22% [Bret Baier jumps in saying, ’74’] of the vote in Arizona at this point and it shows Joe Biden at 53% and the president at 45%. But there is, by all accounts, quite a bit of vote out there that is still not in.”
As expected, we aren’t going to find out the winner of the 2020 election on election night or in the early hours of the morning. Maybe even Thursday.
This election is coming down to a handful of states, notably Nevada, Georgia, and the Midwest trio of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Trump has a decent-size lead in Georgia, but it appears Biden still has a glimmer of hope in the state, with tons of ballots still arriving in the Atlanta area. It has been a grueling day (to put it mildly) for everyone involved in the polling process, and vote-counting in Georgia will resume later Wednesday, per this report from CBS’ Mark Strassmann:
#GEORGIA LATEST:@CBSNews‘ Mark Strassmann reports that state election officials have sent home tabulators who have been working since 6 AM, only having tabulated 49% of the vote in Fulton County — the most consequential in the state #Election2020 https://t.co/IRlbefaYsO pic.twitter.com/qD2Mh8ZWyO
— CBS News Politics (@CBSPolitics) November 4, 2020
ABC News chief White House correspondent Jon Karl said regarding Wisconsin: “I have a very important point to make about Wisconsin and that is this notion of the early vote. What we are told so far in Wisconsin, and there is 64% of the vote in statewide, the percentage of early vote that is in Wisconsin right now we estimate to be zero. They have not begun counting the early vote in Wisconsin. So yes it’s looking good for Donald Trump right now, but that will change dramatically as they open those envelopes, they do the work, the slow-counting of counting the mail-in ballots.”
12:40 a.m. ET: CNN officially called Florida for President Trump. He had also won Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Montana earlier in the hour.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber with an interesting piece of news:
Elections officials in key battleground states Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan issue statements alerting voters that final election results will not be ready until several days after Election Day, according to @MSNBC
— The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC 📺 (@TheBeatWithAri) November 4, 2020
What happened??
A brief moment of John King losing his map colors: #Election2020 pic.twitter.com/xft6suQGlU
— Vulture (@vulture) November 4, 2020
All white. Does that mean we have to start all over again?