Joe Biden has Beaten Donald Trump. It’s Over… or is it?
Yesterday, four days after polls closed, various press outlets called the 2020 US presidential election in favour of Joe Biden. Democrat supporters took to the streets to celebrate. Donald Trump has yet to concede, but that’s just sour grapes. It’s clear now: Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. But is it really over?
Donald Trump’s presidency has been surreal. A man who so many saw as unfit to be president of the United States, let alone president of your local tennis club, somehow did become the US president. He did it while plowing through dozens of scandals that would have sunk any other politician.
Somehow, Donald Trump’s worst feature, his narcissistic personality, was also his greatest asset throughout his campaign and presidency. For the same reason that he faced so many scandals, he evaded them by using his pulpit to pile on shameless self-serving lie after lie that his supporters embraced. Of course, he was helped by a loyal disinformation-entertainment complex.
A key feature of people with narcissistic personalities is that they react very strongly to narcissistic injury. This is why Donald Trump has had problems with democracy that began at the start of his presidency. Even after beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, he claimed there had been large-scale voter fraud in Hillary’s favor by the same amount she beat him in the popular vote.
Trump’s claim about voter fraud in 2016 was baseless and bizarre. The strangest part of it was that he made the claim despite winning. One would think that any orchestrated attempt at creating large-scale voter fraud by the Democrats would have prevented Trump from becoming president. But you can never discount a narcissist wanting to protect his ego.
Now, in 2020, Trump has claimed once again that massive voter fraud took place during the presidential election. He began the claims well before the election and repeated them over and over, like most central messages of his campaigns and presidency.
It was clear many states would change their election rules to encourage more mail-in voting for the 2020 election, as a means of keeping the electorate safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump capitalized on this by claiming these ballots were inherently more prone to fraud. Combined with a much stronger belief among Democrats that COVID-19 is something that should be taken seriously, Trump had set the stage for casting doubt on the legitimacy of a voting method that would be used more by Democrats than Republicans.
Trump’s initial election day claims of voter fraud were incoherent. He trailed Arizona by the end of Tuesday, the day polls closed, and several major media outlets called the state for Biden. At that point, only about 85% of districts had reported. Trump insisted ballots should keep getting counted in that state. On the other hand, by the end of Tuesday Trump was narrowly leading Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. In those states, he insisted votes should stop being counted (presumably because the late-counted votes would be “fraudulent” mail-in ballots).
Like in 2016, Trump’s claims of voter fraud is bizarre. If the Democrats had truly orchestrated some sort of massive fraud, you would have expected them to have made gains in the Senate, the House, and in the gubernatorial races. Instead, the Republicans lost 1 in the Senate, gained 5 in the House, and added one governorship to their pre-election totals.
Nevertheless, the claims of voter fraud have taken on a life of their own. Pro-Trump publications and his ongoing political supporters are pointing to anything and everything they can to suggest there was something unfair about the election. Conservative media is hopping onto the voter fraud narrative, as they have for all of Trump’s toxic and spurious narratives for the past 4.5 years.
The claims of voter fraud now include poll watchers allegedly not being allowed to watch the votes being counted in various places, voting machines glitching out by counting votes for Trump as votes for Biden, whistleblowers coming forward to report irregularities, and an alleged statistical impossibility for Biden to have won certain districts.
Much of this, of course, is hot air. There is no good reason to think this election was any less free and fair as previous US presidential elections. But the number of people involved in running an election, and the sheer scale of it in a country like the US, means there are likely some imperfections in the process. During the first vote in the 2020 Democratic primaries – the Iowa caucuses – the prevalence of human error was apparent.
What this means is that Trump and his legal team will likely be able to find something to litigate about the voting process. They may succeed in getting enough recounts that the election results are called into question. If the recounts take a long time, what happens next? The next US president is scheduled to take office on January 20, 2021.
In Bush v. Gore, the US Supreme Court ruled that the election must be called by December 12, the “safe-harbor” date. Otherwise, ongoing recounts violate the Equal Protection Clause. Trump’s goal may be to find some way to delay the finality of the election to that date. The US Supreme Court, now with a 6–3 conservative (i.e. Republican-leaning) majority, might find a way to help in this regard.
If neither Trump nor Biden clearly has the 270 electors needed to win by mid-December, the process would shift to a contingent election. In a contingent election, each state votes for the president, and each gets one vote. These votes would presumably fall on partisan lines, much as almost all the Senate votes did during Trump’s impeachment trial. Since there’s currently 27 states with Republican control of the state Houses of Representatives, their votes would outnumber the Democrat-run states. Trump would gain another 4-year term.
Is this likely to happen? Probably not. But there is a real effort being made by conservative media to amplify the voter fraud narrative, and a significant number of Trump loyalists willing to promote the message too. The real loser in all this, of course, is American democracy. Today, US citizens’ faith in the democratic process must be at a 100-year low.
