It was not only the campaign’s chaos and competing power centers that gave it a problem with numbers and a confused sense of the playing field. The basic premise of election modeling and Election Day gaming and projecting is knowing where the votes are. The location of votes judged against turnout, past history, comparable demographics, and knowing when they have appeared in the ongoing count is part of a reasonable and generally reliable data analysis. But this goes amiss, radically amiss, if you don’t know where the votes are, how many there are, who is casting them, and when they will be counted and reported.

COVID-prompted mail-in voting had seriously upset the models. Mailing in your ballot was a significantly different action from showing up at a polling station, and because it hadn’t been done on such a massive scale before, it was difficult to anticipate or model that behavior—who would vote, how many would vote, and from where. Indeed, in the constant seesaw of trying to maximize your voters and minimize your opponent’s, here, finally, was a curious work-around for the Democrats’ longtime problem of getting “low-propensity” voters to the polls—and a way to counter the Republicans’ longtime successful efforts to discourage those same voters from turning out. Now the low-propensities didn’t have to go to the polls. It was this loss of an advantage that Trump found personally galling and somehow, by turning COVID into an opportunity, downright unjust. COVID was being used to the Dems’ advantage—hence, rigging the election. That is, in Trump’s mind, it was rigged, because, by putting this advantage to work, the Dems had taken the advantage back from the Republicans (even if, in the past, the GOP had used low-propensity behavior to their advantage). In a zero-sum world—worse, a world in which the Republican Party was getting ever smaller—you couldn’t let any advantage go. If somebody stole your advantage, they were stealing your vote.

Democrats, by gaming the potential advantages of this mail-in behavior, had a lot better sense of the nature of this new voting paradigm. Whereas the Republicans—having, by the Trump diktat, written off mail-in balloting as somehow fanciful or illegitimate or ephemeral, or even by denying its existence (another general aspect of the party’s COVID head in the sand) and believing it could somehow be rolled back or undone even as millions of ballots went out—were left substantially more in the dark.

COVID-inspired mail-in voting had created a blind pool of votes—at least to the Republicans. The mail-in ballots were a sword of Damocles over their heads