Nov 7, 2020 3 min read

If the end of the COVID-infused election season Tuesday proved anything, the United States is as disunited as ever.

As New York Times columnist Timothy Egan observed, “Ah, the will of the people. Who knows what the hell that is.”

Despite what almost all the polls suggested, the presidential race turned out to be tight. It looks like Joe Biden will win the popular vote by a margin of about 4%, which is identical to Barack Obama’s margin over Mitt Romney in 2012. The battleground states, including Pennsylvania, had much closer margins and made the fight for votes in the Electoral College much more of a nail-biter. It was yet another election where minuscule shifts in some states could have led to an entirely different outcome.

This region’s steady movement over the last two decades from being solidly Democratic to firmly Republican continued. Ticket-splitting was once common across the country, but it’s been perishing as America has become more polarized, and it’s all but dead in this area. There is one exception, though: Pam Snyder, a seasoned Greene County Democrat, managed to fend off a challenge from Republican newcomer Larry Yost, and will continue to represent the 50th Legislative District, which includes all of Greene and parts of Washington and Fayette counties.

This was bound to be an unusual election even at the outset of 2020, since it was the first time that no-excuse, mail-in ballots were allowed in Pennsylvania. It became even more atypical when the coronavirus pandemic hit in March and led more than 2 million Pennsylvanians to decide that they wanted to vote by mail in the general election rather than risk venturing out to their polling places. The passions inflamed by Donald Trump’s presidency led to record-breaking levels of voter engagement. Through it all, state and local elections officials handled it all with grace, skill and efficiency. We can verify that the Washington County elections office counted votes and reported results without any significant problems. The county’s website is much-improved, and workers did an admirable job of counting mail-in ballots. The media was allowed to monitor and report on the results from the employee lunchroom located on the same floor as the elections office.

And kudos should also be extended to current and former Republican elected officials in Pennsylvania who pushed back against the president’s evidence-free claims of voter fraud in the commonwealth. U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey pointed out, “There is simply no evidence that anybody has shown me, or anyone else I’m aware of, of any kind of corruption or fraud.” Former Gov. Tom Ridge said that Trump’s cries of fraud, “disrespected every single American who figured out a way to safely vote amid a pandemic that has taken 235,000 lives.”

Barack Obama famously argued in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that he didn’t see blue states or red states, but United States. This election demonstrated that we still have a long way to travel to fulfill that goal.