Next Tuesday on Election Day, don’t be surprised if you hear frequent references to two terms: Red mirage and blue shift.
What exactly do those terms mean? As CNN explained recently, they refer to Republicans’ early lead after polls close and the dramatic shift of Democrats’ lead as mail-in ballots and those from large population centers are tallied.
The (2020) contest between then-President Trump and now-President Joe Biden was still too early to call in the key states of Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The following days would include dramatic hours spent watching the counting of votes in these states. The vote count didn’t reflect a Biden lead in Georgia until early in the morning of November 6, when, as CNN’s Phil Mattingly showed viewers on the Magic Wall, small batches of votes were being counted and affecting the very close election.
CNN was able to project that Biden would win the election four days after Election Day, on November 7, but counting would continue. An analysis by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that counties won by Biden counted slower, on average, than counties won by Trump.
That red mirage and blue shift are likely to be exploited by former president Donald Trump this year, former Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich warns in a video he posted on YouTube, with Trump likely using it to once again suggest the election has been rigged against him.
This “dirty Trump trick,” Reich explained, “doesn’t work if you know it’s coming.”
Referencing 2020, Reich notes, Trump “pretended the blue shift was surprising and suspicious,” but in reality there was “nothing miraculous or secret about it.”
The 2024 election is also expected to be neck-and-neck, Reich continues, so Trump will probably “appear to be ahead and, again, use that early lead to falsely claim victory.”
“Mirages can be confusing, but if you know what they are, you won’t be fooled by them,” Reich concludes.
No election is complete until all of the ballots have been counted. Granted, it can be maddening when we have to wait days for the results, but that’s just the way democracy works.
