All signs point to Hillary Clinton losing Florida and North Carolina and Ohio and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and maybe Michigan, too. Although no news outlets have officially called the race for Trump, it’s hard to see another outcome at this point. Clinton surrogates are admitting that she lost because there is no current path to victory on the map.
But Clinton will not be conceding tonight. At 2AM, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta took the stage at the Javits Center in New York and told everyone to go home. “It’s been a long night and it’s been a long campaign, but I can say that we can wait a little longer, can’t we,” Podesta said. “They’re still counting votes and every vote can count. Several states are too close to call. So we’re not going to have any more to say tonight.”
It’s possible that Clinton and her team are seeing something that literally everyone else is not seeing. But that seems unlikely. In any case, Clinton has signaled that the she is going to wait until the last possible moment to concede.
Of course, as many Trump surrogates (and some others) have pointed out, Clinton hammered Trump for his refusal to say that he would accept the results of the election. Those comments, though justified, may come back to haunt her. That said, the crowd at Trump’s rally is chanting, “Lock her up,” so we are very much through the looking glass when it comes to political norms.