Elections
Here’s what Bernie Sanders said in October would happen election night — and it did
Sen. Bernie Sanders had some eerily accurate predictions for how election night would play out — and he made them during an interview all the way back in October.
During an Oct. 23 interview on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the Vermont senator outlined some of his concerns as to what could transpire the night of the election.
First, he predicted that several states — namely battlegrounds such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — could get a huge influx of mail-in ballots that they’d be unable to finish counting on Election Day.
“Unlike states like Florida or Vermont they aren’t able, for bad reasons, to begin processing those ballots until Election Day or maybe when the polls close,” he said during the interview posted on YouTube. “That means you’re going to have states dealing with perhaps millions of mail-in ballots.”
As of Wednesday morning, those three states, as well as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina are still counting ballots, and results could take several days.
Next, Sanders noted that Democrats are more likely to use mail-in ballots than voters across the aisle, meaning that the first ballots to be counted would likely be those of Republican voters who went to polling stations. He said it was his “worry” that this could lead President Donald Trump to prematurely declaring victory.
“It could well be that at 10 o’clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he’s winning in Pennsylvania, he’s winning in Wisconsin, and he gets on the television and says, ‘Thank you Americans for re-electing me, it’s all over, have a good day,’” Sanders said.
“But then the next day and the day following all those mail-in ballots start getting counted and it turns out that (Joe) Biden has won those states. At which point Trump says, ‘See, I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked. And we’re not going to leave office.’”
It may not have been at 10 p.m. Tuesday, but Trump did prematurely claim victory during a White House press conference in the early hours of Wednesday, despite several key states still counting ballots.
Trump said the delay in calling the election is “a fraud on the American public” adding that “we will be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
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