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I Am Terrified to Go to Bed Tonight
Will there be another bad surprise in the morning like in 2016?
I remember the evening of the 2016 US election day. All projections had Hillary Clinton in the lead and the general mood was that she was leading on the day. So I went to bed assuming she was going to bring it home.
When I woke up and saw the results I was shocked and in disbelief. How could all projections have been this wrong?
Now, in 2020, the national polls have Joe Biden leading by 8 to 10 points again. A lead like this in a German election poll would almost certainly guarantee a victory. But with the outdated electoral college system in the US, it means very little. Trump could still pull off a win.
The Electoral College
The electoral college is a weird and outdated system. Not only to a European like myself but also to a majority of the Americans (61%). How can it be that a candidate that wins an election by 2.8 million votes doesn’t become the president? Why does a vote in Delaware count 3 times as much as one in California?
2 of the last 5 elections resulted in a president that didn’t win the popular vote with Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000 and Trump vs. Clinton in 2016. Both of them Republicans. So it’s no wonder that the Republicans…
