Here in 2020, Georgia hasn’t been called yet, but Biden’s taken the lead. He’s more than 10,000 votes ahead, a very formidable lead even if there’s a recount. Historically, statewide recounts shift the final count by a few hundred votes, and not always in favor of the candidate who was trailing. But if you put Georgia into the Biden column (and let’s assume that Trump ends up with North Carolina), Biden ends up with 306 Electoral votes and, let’s not forget, a popular vote lead of more than 4 million.
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won 306 Electoral votes (he ended up with 304 because of two “faithless electors”, but let’s call it 306). At the time, Kellyanne Conway tweeted “306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic.” Trump was even more subdued, wallflower that he is. And that was accompanied by coming up short 2.7 million in the popular vote contest. Oh, sure, he called it a fake number, claiming that millions of ineligible people voted against him. Oddly though, in the four years since, he’s provided a grand total of zero evidence to back up that claim, and his sycophantic DOJ never investigated his claims, let alone prosecuted anyone.
So, by Trump’s own standards, 2020 is a big win for Biden.
Per current estimates, he will receive something like 51.3 percent of the national popular vote, 3 percentage points more than Hillary Clinton and a higher total than any candidate challenging an incumbent president since FDR got 57 percent against Herbert Hoover in 1932. That’s more than Ronald Reagan got (50.7 percent) in his 1980 win over Jimmy Carter, which is still (accurately!) heralded as a paradigm shift in American politics. Besides FDR, the only other American presidential candidate who ran against an incumbent president and got more than 52 percent of the vote was William Henry Harrison in 1840.
Meh, I’m no huge fan of the Electoral College. It’s outdated and undemocratic (do we really need to hear that it’s a republic, not a democracy rant again?), but archaic and anti-democratic as it is, it does act as a safety valve in one sense: what might happen if we moved to a popular vote system and then the results came back 76,213,789 to 76,213,532? There wouldn’t be challenges in one state or two, but in every state.
But here in 2020, Biden won the Electoral vote and the popular vote, both by comfortable margins. Sure, Trump’s playing the sore loser, going off to play golf as the networks report the results. He’s been Twitter ranting about how unfair the system is and threatening lawsuits left and right. Or right and right. They’ll fail and he’ll be out of a job on January 20th. His third-string lawyers are trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. It’s not going well.
The Trump campaign “voter fraud” hotline “has turned into a nightmare… bombarded with prank calls from people laughing or mocking them over Biden’s win before hanging up,” ABC News reports.
Rick Wilson: “In their time of crisis, calling 1-888-630-1776 would distract them from their vital work. So please don’t call 1-888-630-1776.”
I’ve seen more that a few Trumpists already saying that Trump will run again in 2024 (a tacit admission that he lost in 2020). But how realistic is that? Even if he (tries) to pardon himself or resigns and gets a pardon from President For Twelve Days Pence, he’ll still be facing indictment and multiple criminal charges in New York. And how well would he be able to campaign from his cell in Landsberg Prison?
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons (UserTwoSix, CC BY 4.0)
