Only a few caught the nagging afterthought that Oz now persisted in adding to every assessment:… assuming they don’t find new votes. It certainly had an inexact, if not downright existential, ring, suggesting shadowy forces … or awfully poor analytics.

At 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki said he believed Arizona was still in play, and Rachel Maddow could be heard saying, “Oh God,” in the background, which was interpreted as a strong tell in the Trump camp: the libs were scared.

Wednesday closed as if still not a done deal, then at least a net-positive day: they should win. For many, this continued to translate into: they would win. Tuesday’s despair had been replaced by Wednesday’s optimism.

They had done it again.

“It’s a landslide, they’re telling me,” Trump assured friends.

“How do you feel about Arizona and Pennsylvania?” Oz was asked on Thursday morning, before the roundup meeting.

“We’re getting some info ready now for when we meet. We’re still in the ball game in both places. Arizona didn’t count as many as we thought last night, but it broke to us by 59 percent. Penn[sylvania], we still have room—assuming they don’t find new votes.” The margin of victory in Pennsylvania, the night before, at a firm 50,000, was now holding at 35,000. But Oz had also included a question, in all caps, in his report: “IS PHILLY TOTALLY REPORTING?”

Still, the numbers were holding up:

At 10 a.m. on Thursday, Eastern Time, in the next report, the numbers team was projecting a win by 7,000 in Arizona, by 5,000 in Georgia, and now down but holding by 25,000 in Pennsylvania.

The innermost team (Kushner, Hicks, Scavino, Stepien, Miller, Clark, and Herschmann) convened late Thursday morning. Kushner was advocating a largely positive spin, taking his cue from Oz. Nobody was seriously pushing back.

But every number that came in seemed to be an erosion of the last report. The Georgia margin was disappearing.

Oz reported near noon: “Every key takeaway is no one has a good read on GA—every outlet is all over the place. At this point people are putting out numbers based completely on conjecture and gut feelings.”

It was hardly encouraging that the data guy didn’t know what the real numbers were.

At 12:50, another 36,000 votes were added to the Pennsylvania tally, 35,000 of them mail-in. Biden won 25,000. There were rumors, but no confirmation, of 735,000 uncounted mail-in votes in Pennsylvania.

At 1:12 p.m., all of Oz’s numbers and margins were down farther.

Fifteen minutes later, their lead in Pennsylvania was slashed by two-thirds. Within the hour, they were wiped out.

In less than two hours, they had gone from buoyant to fucked—and with an increasing sense that all their numbers had largely been a crapshoot.

Stepien, Clark, and Miller sat down together on the L-shaped couch in Stepien’s office. Just sitting there, not saying anything.

Trump existed in a peculiar vacuum of information throughout Thursday.