How the election was lost
Upon awakening this morning I encountered a rare eXcretion from Donald Trump that read in part: “I am very surprised that the Democrats, who fought a hard and valiant fight in the 2020 Presidential Election, raising a record amount of money, didn’t have lots of $’s left over. Now they are being squeezed by vendors and others. Whatever we can do to help them during this difficult period, I would strongly recommend we, as a Party and for the sake of desperately needed UNITY, do.”
I don’t suppose Trump meant this uncommon flash of enlightened bonhomie any more than he meant his promise of “food for everyone” last year at Miami’s Cuban restaurant Versaille, before skipping out without paying the check. But what interested me was one of the replies to Trump’s tweet from one of his drooling MAGA idolaters, who observed that, before offering any such generosity, Democrats should first be forced to admit that they stole the 2020 election.
That statement begs the important question that, if we stole the 2020 election, why on earth didn’t we steal this one? After all, if we can steal an election when Trump is in charge of the administration, it should be easy to steal one when Biden is in charge.
The answer, of course, is that no one stole anything. To be sure, there was a lot of monkeying about by Russian bots in the last three elections, and some 70 or more bomb threats coming from email accounts originating in Russia this time, but as far as I can tell, the votes themselves as reported were true representations of the votes that were actually cast.
But I had my suspicions at first. I asked the same questions many others asked. Why, for example, were there nearly 10 million fewer votes this time than there were last time? What impact, if any, did the bomb threats have on the result? The answer, as it happens, is because that is how many Americans decided not to vote, and no, the bomb threats did not significantly change the outcome of the election.
There are 175,441 voting precincts in the United States from which the results are all known. Some counties feed ballots into optical scanners, while others use touch-screen systems or ballot-marking devices to record votes. The scanners are the most common. They tabulate results automatically, which are then manually recounted and double-checked by hand. It would require a flabbergasting number of cheaters to have faked those results. And when conspirators grow beyond a shockingly small number, the odds that one of them won’t blow the whistle becomes vanishingly small, so small in fact as to render such a thing impossible. That is why cheating on a scale that would matter simply couldn’t happen without it being exposed.
But if you still doubt this, consider the undeniable fact that Kamala Harris did far worse in states she was expected to win easily. She still won them, to be sure, but not by the robust margins expected. In New Jersey, to pick a blue state at random, Kamala was expected to win by double digits. She won by only 5 percent.
“Ah,” said one conspiracy theory minded friend of mine, “that is where they were particularly clever. They cheated in ALL the states, not just the battleground states, to make their cheating less obvious.” I isolate this quote to make an observation about your classic conspiracy theorist. This is the point where they confer magical powers on the enemy.
There is no doubt in my mind that Republicans would have cheated if they could. But they didn’t this time. This was a free and fair election that we lost. The sooner we acknowledge that fact, the sooner we can begin taking steps to fix the problem that led to this horrific outcome.
The problems are manifold. But the biggest problem lies firmly with the mainstream media. They deliberately nitpicked Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris to death, and then they gave Trump largely a free pass. To be sure, they had the odd talking head occasionally tell the truth, people like Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow, but for the most part they made it sound as if Donald Trump wasn’t what he was, a bigot, a rapist, a convicted criminal, an illegitimate and even constitutionally illegal candidate for the most important and sacred office in the world. They did it on purpose so they could reap the financial reward of a brisk 24/7 news cycle that a Trump presidency will inevitably bring.
Never before have I wished more that the stinging edge of the adage “be careful what you wish for” was true. And we can help to bring that to pass by turning off the MSM and turning on progressive social media. But we must also get our candidates to do the same.
Trump appeared on far more rightwing podcasts than Kamala, podcasts such as Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman and the All-In podcast. Kamala only appeared on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. Democrats have to start recognising that the old way of doing things, appearing on mainstream media and 60 Minutes, might be a good place to start, but they cannot finish there. They need to understand that progressive social media and even conservative social media are critical places for them to go. Millions of people watch or listen to those outlets. And they vote.
As I have said before, brothers and sisters, we need to give the old heave-ho to the mainstream media. They have betrayed us in every recent election, and we are fools not to recognise that they will go right on betraying us. They wanted another Trump presidency to boost their profits and prestige, and they got exactly what they wanted.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.