The masses turned in for the night during the early hours on Wednesday with President Donald Trump ahead of Democratic candidate Joe Biden by around 5 points. By sunrise, Biden had gained nearly 139,000 votes due to an alleged data error.
As Wednesday morning’s counts added to the early morning influx of votes, the race had slimmed down to less than one percentage point – a slightly larger margin than Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Registered voters totaled nearly 8.13 million in the mitten: over 5.5 million casted their vote. By Thursday, Biden had cropped up 2.8 million over Trump’s 2.6 million.
The majority of the witching hour ballot dump consisted of mail-in voters. Fact-checkers explained that the significant jump occurred because Michigan counts mail-in ballots last. A majority of these voters identified as Biden supporters in pre-election research.
While Trump enjoyed a consistent lead after polls closed on Tuesday, he lost the lead to Biden at 9 a.m. EST the next morning.
Commentators likened the closeness of Minnesota’s outcomes to their polling predictions in the neighboring states of Wisconsin and Michigan.
In an interview with The Tennessee Star, Virginia Beach attorney and political pundit Tim Anderson explained that the voter dump is likely not indicative of fraud – it indicated that expanded mail-in ballots and early-voting windows caused more Democrats to show up with their vote.
“There’s a lot more Democrats out there than we hoped there were,” he said. “When you look at the statewide absentee ballots, you have more for Biden than Trump. Then you get down to the congressional districts, and you start peeling these numbers back – and the absentee numbers are 65-70 percent Democrat.”
Even in the deep red state of Tennessee, absentee ballots favored Biden.
Anderson added that those voter tendencies were the reason behind early calls in the media, as seen most controversially with Fox News.
“As soon as they knew how many absentee ballots were outstanding, and they knew a majority of those were going to go for Biden, that’s easy to call,” he said.
Anderson also explained to The Star that the types of lawsuits that the president is filing aren’t challenging the legality of the votes themselves, but how the votes are being processed.
The attorney’s lasting remarks asserted that the incoming results indicate a need for the Republican Party to rebrand instead of accusing the Democratic Party of stealing and cheating the election.
“That’s the cold, hard truth of reality – the Republican Party needs to rebrand. It needs to be rewritten by every conservative out there,” Anderson said.
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Corinne Murdock is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and the Star News Network. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to [email protected].
