One more state. Updating coverage: A victory in any one of the still-undecided battleground states would be enough to carry Joe Biden to the White House …
■ … but President Trump’s campaign is suing over the count in three states.
■ BuzzFeed News: Trump can’t just “go” to the Supreme Court to fight election results.
■ CNN’s master fact-checker, Daniel Dale: “Almost everything Trump has said after Election Day is wrong.”
Impatient care. As the count dragged on, protesters on both sides of the divide took to the nation’s streets—and police arrested hundreds.
■ Trump backers have swarmed around vote-counting centers in Michigan and Arizona.
Polling’s ‘catastrophe.’ The pre-election failure of public opinion surveys, David A. Graham writes in The Atlantic, “leaves Americans with no reliable way to understand what we as a people think outside of elections—which in turn threatens our ability … to cohere as a nation.”
■ The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan: “We should never again put as much stock in public opinion polls.”
■ Tim Alberta at Politico: Three reasons Biden was able to flip the Midwest.
■ The election seems to have been surprisingly hack-free.
‘Cable news needs to take Election Day off.’ Media writer Jack Shafer: “Instead of honestly conceding that there’s not much to report,” news channels “attempted to sustain a permanent state of excitement.”
■ Columbia Journalism Review editor in chief Kyle Pope: In the run-up to Election Day, “Journalists spent too much time talking to each other on Twitter, inhabiting an alternate algorithmic reality that bore little resemblance to the life of the country.”
Under-Ober. Even though no credible organization had declared a winner and votes were still being counted, Republican ice-cream magnate and veteran dog-whistler (2019 link) Jim Oberweis claimed victory over incumbent Democratic Congresswoman Lauren Underwood.
■ Nationwide, Democrats have lost at least seven House incumbents and failed to oust even one Republican.
■ If the Senate Republican majority survives, a President Biden could have a tough time appointing a progressive Cabinet.
‘We paid a heavy price.’ U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin has leveled what Politico says may be “the bluntest criticism an elected Democrat has leveled” against Illinois House Speaker and state party chairman Michael Madigan, blaming him for the state party’s election losses.
■ The Sun-Times’ Mark Brown: Republicans’ “anti-Madigan strategy … finally reached critical mass.”
■ Rick Pearson in the Trib: “A state GOP that’s known mostly failure for nearly 20 years was able to deal … stinging defeats” to the Democrats.
■ With the defeat of the “Fair Tax Amendment,” Gov. Pritzker warns, “There will be cuts and they will be painful.”
■ One Illinois: “The only thing that seems clear right now is that we’ll all be paying higher taxes together.”
‘Our long national nightmare is not over.’ Columnist Steve Chapman says, whoever wins, “He will struggle to unite Americans behind his leadership.”
■ Tribune columnist Rex Huppke: “A huge swath—almost half—of this country is either racist or just fine with racism.” (Cartoon: Keith J. Taylor.)
■ Joan Walsh in The Nation: “My heart is broken that it wasn’t a landslide.”
■ Slate: “This electorate seems to have been more conservative than the 2016 electorate.”
■ Politico’s John Harris: “The environment that produced Trump-style politics will continue even if Trump is not president.”
■ The Trib’s Eric Zorn: “Trumpism without Trump” is “an even more frightening thought … than Trumpism with Trump.”
■ CNN’s Brian Stelter: “In the event of a Biden win, the loudest voices in the pro-Trump media world will assign much of the blame to ‘the media,’ excluding themselves, of course.”
Post-election grief strategies. A political science professor says they include getting (re-)engaged with politics.
■ Neil Steinberg sees “rays of hope piercing the gloom” …
■ … and, Friday afternoon, Christmas music returns to Chicago’s radio airwaves.
Get a test. Illinois’ public health director, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, says COVID-19 has spread so widely that Illinoisans should get tested regularly, whether they have symptoms or not.
■ For the first time since the pandemic’s onset, the U.S. reported more than 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day.
■ Even if you escape symptoms, COVID-19 can hurt your heart.
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