With the outcome of what most political observers and historians agree is the most important Presidential Election since before the Civil War, all eyes were on Michigan Tuesday along with two other upper Midwest states, although the final election results may not be known until Wednesday afternoon or later in the week.
As polls throughout the state closed at 8 pm, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson continued to warn that with a record number of absentee ballots cast in this year’s election her office will have its hands full in counting all the ballots and providing a final count one evening.
Her office reported more than 3 million Michiganders turned in absentee ballots, by Tuesday morning. They take considerably longer to count than in-person votes, Benson said.
In a series of media interviews, she noted that is around three times more than were received in the last presidential election in 2016, due in large part to a change in state law that allows for no-reason absentee voting. Election officials expect at least another 2 million people to vote in person, breaking turnout records.
Still, even amidst the high voter turnout officials from the Office of the Secretary of State said the voting process ran much smoother than anticipated and some media outlets have suggested they may be able to call the results of the presidential election much sooner than Benson is predicting.
Final polls going into Tuesday election had the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Biden leading Republican President Donald J. Trump by seven points according to the Detroit Free Press, 48%-41%. RealClearPolitics.com average has him down 6.5 percentage points.
Unexpected Trump victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2016 launched the reality-TV show host into the White House making him the first Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984 to win all three states.
Michigan is considered among the most important states in Biden’s attempt to rebuild the Democrats “Blue Wall” of traditional Democratic-leaning industrial states that gave them a reliable anchor in the Midwest against Republican opponents in presidential elections. That wall crumbled in 2016 against Trump.
Although it will be days before the final votes are tallied, Biden was ahead in final polls from Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too.
For African Americans, this year’s election is of paramount importance after enduring four non-stop years of racist assaults from the Trump Administration.
The most obvious being more than 230,000 Americans dead, and more than 8 million infected from a worldwide deadly Covid-19 pandemic that has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown Americans. Couple the pandemic with a massive economic recession that has seen the Black unemployment rate triple and 40 percent of small Black businesses close, and the Trump presidency has proven to be an unmitigated disaster for Black America.
Black Americans experience the highest actual COVID-19 mortality rates nationwide—two or more times as high as the rate for Whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates.
So, when civil rights and other African American leaders claimed Tuesday election as the most important in our lifetime, it was not hyperbole. It is a hard, cold, fact.
In fact, National Washington Post-ABC News polls over the past month showed Biden leading Trump by more than 80 points among Black voters.
And historians of all races and ethnicities have been nearly unanimous in their assessment that Trump’s breathtaking moral turpitude and his arguably being the most incompetent, corrupt, blatantly racist, and dangerous man to occupy the White House since the Confederate sympathizer, Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded Abraham Lincoln following his assassination in 1865, has been particularly onerous for Black Americans.
Trump has sabotaged Obamacare and at this very moment is in the Supreme Court demanding it permanently destroy the healthcare policy that not only protects people with pre-existing conditions from being discriminated against by insurers but has provided affordable healthcare coverage to more than 23 million Americans including more than 800,00 Michiganders.
In addition, his administration has gone out of its way to undermine public schools, gutted federal aid to the states, and so badly eviscerated the Justice Department that no rational citizen dare look to it for anything approaching justice or equal treatment under the law. And working hand in glove with a neo-Confederate controlled Republican Party, it has malevolently packed and resegregated the federal courts with bigots and far-right extremists so hostile toward civil rights and the rights of African Americans in particular that the consensus among most African American political, legal, religious, and academic scholars is that we are now in the throes of a Second Post-Reconstruction.
Given all these facts, while a Biden or Trump victory remains up in the air at the time of printing, the will of Black voters in Michigan and elsewhere is bound to be heard.
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