Here’s the surprising part
Joe Biden is now on track to win the Electoral College with room to spare, and win the popular vote by as much as seven million votes. In presidential election terms, that’s something of a blowout. The national polling averages may even end up being within their stated margin of error, which by their definition means they weren’t wrong.
The bizarre Senate results aside, the Presidential election has turned out to be pretty unsurprising. In fact, if the votes had been counted in the traditional fashion instead of mail-in ballots being counted last, Biden would have been on a clear path to victory the entire time, and we’d have seen the results as fairly drama-free. Here’s the part that surprises me, though.
Once it started to become clear on Wednesday morning that Joe Biden was on a path to win, it also started to become clear that Donald Trump had absolutely no viable strategy or game plan in place for such a scenario. If he was going the litigation route, he didn’t even bother filing while he was artificially ahead in those states; he waited until far too late. There was no endgame involving Bill Barr. There was no real endgame as far as mailed ballots still at the Post Office, either.
The point is this: of course Trump was going to play this in villainous fashion. But what’s stunning is just how incompetent his villainy was. It’s as if he decided that the phony Hunter Biden story and the pre-election Post Office antics were 100% certain to give him a victory, and that he didn’t even bother to come up with a Plan B.
Perhaps Donald Trump is simply such a narcissist that he couldn’t even consider the possibility that he’d end up legitimately getting fewer votes, and that he might therefore need a fallback plan on election day. Trump’s villainy never surprises me; there is no bottom for him. But his incompetence as a villain is just remarkable. The guy’s whole life was on the line with this election, and he didn’t even properly game plan for it.
