Election 2020

 One day early this week, but not about Christmas.  What can I say?  Birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, Christmas carols, presents, Santa Araya, etc.  Too much about Christmas is common knowledge and too obvious to discuss.  I don’t bring anything different or special to the table to make a blog entry worthwhile.

Ah, but this last election.  

First off:  BIDEN WON, TRUMP LOST.  The electorate is 1/3 Republican, 1/3 Democrat, and 1/3 independent.   It’s possibly ¼ Republican, ¼ Democrat, and ½ independent.  Either way, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have enough of their own voters to elect the President without the assistance of independents, most of whom are in the middle.  If your candidate’s popularity has dropped to the point where your own party members are supporting the other candidate, that’s a bad sign. 

Second.  I voted for Jo Jorgenson, not Trump or Biden.  I live in Virginia, which has become bluer than it was in 2016, when it voted for Hillary Clinton.  The governor, Ralph Northam, is a Democrat.  Both US Senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, are Democrats.  The state legislature in Richmond, the General Assembly, is now majority Democrat.  Sure, there are plenty of Republicans and Trump 2020 signs in Virginia, but not as many as Democrats and Biden-Harris signs.

Jorgenson got 1% of the vote, and won no states.  That doesn’t surprise me.  She has no political experience as an elected official – unlike two term New Mexico governor Gary Johnson – and there’s really no reason for anyone to vote for her except because she happened to be the LP candidate.  Ideally the LP should pick candidates like Johnson who would qualify as major party candidates, but obviously I didn’t choose her.  We’ll see what happens in 2024. 

Third.  This business of “interference 2016” vs. “interference 2020”.   The 2016 interference alleged was that the Russians leaked unflattering information about Hillary Clinton which induced some people to vote for Trump instead.  I don’t recall a single allegation that the Russians tampered with voting machines or absentee and/or mail-in ballots, and for that matter I don’t recall anyone actually determining how many erstwhile Hillary voters switched their votes to Trump in swing states, thanks to this leaked information, pushing the election in his favor.   The more plausible explanation is that Hillary Clinton was less popular than she believed herself, and with her heavily favored to win the election anyway, the only people intensely motivated to vote were people who drank the Trump Kool-Aid (actually, it was Flavor-Aid in Jonestown).

Fourth.  I’m hearing lots of people on the Book of Faces and elsewhere expressing skepticism about the legitimacy of the election and insinuating that Trump’s allegations of fraud are legitimate.  Apparently they have more evidence than Trump’s own attorneys.  More evidence than Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, who advised the President to concede the election.  More evidence than Mitch McConnell (R-KY) or Pat Robertson, who likewise accepted, however reluctantly, Biden’s victory.  Not a single judge, least of all the US Supreme Court, which is 5-4 conservative (Trump’s own three appointees, Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, plus Alito and Thomas), accepted these arguments.  Likewise with lower courts, many of whose judges are likewise conservative.  These judges have consistently chastised Trump’s lawyers for filing suits without any evidence to support them.  Trump apparently believes that all you have to do is file a suit and you win the case – bullshit and arrogance are acceptable substitutes for evidence.   This vast conspiracy of judges seems to disagree.

Moreover, there’s a runoff election in Georgia, and both Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell won re-election.  If the Democrats learned how to manipulate the elections, common sense dictates they would have made Rand Paul the senior senator from Kentucky and made sure to flip the Senate. 

I’m not surprised Biden won.  I’m surprised the margin wasn’t even higher.  Many Republicans and independents only voted for Trump in 2016 because they couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton.  Joe Biden is considerably less arrogant and unlikeable among non-Democrats.  It reached the point where many high profile Republicans were endorsing Joe Biden.  I didn’t hear any high profile Democrats endorsing Trump.  If there was any chicanery going on, logic suggests it was on the Republicans’ part.  Some recounts were seeing Biden’s lead getting bigger, not smaller.   The absentee ballots were clearly Biden supporters who wanted to make sure that Trump did not win a second term.  Trump’s own voters assumed he would win re-election and simply voted as usual on election day.  Not only that, although absentee voting started weeks before, many states have rules prohibiting these votes from being counted before election day, instead of being counted when they came in and added to the election day votes to reach the final outcome.  So I knew we wouldn’t know the true outcome on election night.  Whether that changes by 2024, we’ll have to see.   In the meantime, enjoy 4 years of Joe Biden.