Biden Really Won
I'm not happy about it, but facts don't care about my feelings.
This is a companion post to “The President’s Insurrection.” I apologize for sending two emails in one day, but these ended up inextricably linked and had to be published at the same time.
Since Election Night 2020, former President Donald Trump has made frequent public claims that the November 3 election was tainted by fraud so widespread that it affirmatively changed the outcome of the election from the “true” Trump victory to a “fraudulent” Biden victory.
This claim was and is factually false. There are several fairly easy ways we can see why.
On November 3, 2020, each state and the District of Columbia held popular elections to seat a total of 538 presidential electors. Electors who had publicly pledged to support Joe Biden won a majority of the seats available that night.
Those electors were duly certified by their state governments. On December 14, they cast their electoral votes. 306 voted for Biden, 232 for Trump. Biden had won a majority of certified electoral votes.
Here is the first way that we know Biden won. It isn’t all that morally satisfying, but it is, legally, probably the most important mechanism the American system has for ensuring that presidential elections (even disputed ones) always have a single true outcome, timely arrived at: we don’t vote for president. We vote for electors. Electors are elected officials, who, like other elected officials, are commissioned and certified by the appropriate government body before performing official duties.
Certification is very important. Once an official is certified, commissioned, and/or seated, acts taken by that official generally have valid legal force, even if the official is later found to have been wrongly seated and thus removed. For example, suppose that someone stole a Senate election and got away with it, becoming a U.S. Senator. That Senator is involved in several tie votes which decide the fate of critical legislation. Later, his cheating comes to light, his election is declared null and he is expelled from the Senate. What happens to all those votes he cast as a senator? They remain valid. Legislation that passed thanks to his vote stays passed, without vanishing from the lawbooks; legislation that he defeated does not suddenly revive and become law.
The presidential electors, duly certified by their state governments (Republican and Democratic state governments alike), only cast one vote during their brief term in office, but, on December 14, 2020, cast it they each did. 306 voted for Biden, 232 for Trump.1
Legally, it does not matter whether you think the electors’ elections on November 3 were defective or not, or even if you think they outright stole the elections with rampant ballot-stuffing. Competing candidates had opportunities, under state laws, to demand recounts, request audits, and/or challenge the results in a court of law. Many did. If their efforts didn’t lead to a change the legally-recognized result before the state certified the results, too bad. That’s the system.
Of course, you can always continue to push for what you see as the truth. However, even if you someday manage to prove, beyond a doubt, that Minnesota Democrat Melvin Aanerud won his seat through fraud,2 you can’t cancel the vote Melvin cast for Biden on December 14. You might be able to put him in jail. You might instate reforms to keep it from ever happening again. But, as a certified and seated public official at the time of his vote, his vote stands.
306 certified electors voted for Biden, 232 for Trump. Biden won. He’s president. Prove that he rigged the election of electors by personally leading secret SWAT teams into Maricopa County to shred Trump ballots and he’d still be president. (At that point, the Congress ought to impeach him.) Legally speaking, we can end the inquiry right there.
Morally speaking, though, that isn’t even a little bit satisfying. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about whether the Biden electors should have been certified in the first place.
That brings us to our second way of knowing Biden won: his margin.
In Florida 2000, the election night count showed that George W. Bush won the state by 1,784 votes (0.03% of votes cast). On a machine recount, Bush won by 327 votes (<0.01%).
A margin of victory that’s less than 0.05% of votes cast is effectively a tie. It’s so close that errors and, yes, fraud can pretty easily swing the outcome. The true result in Florida can never be truly established. In fact, to this very day, it’s plausible to say anything from “Bush won Florida by 1,665 votes” to “Gore won Florida by 171 votes.” That is to say, errors and undetected3 voter fraud could swing a single statewide election by 0.03% or 0.04%.
Indeed, In Minnesota’s 2008 Senate election (also decided by <0.01%), it’s fairly plausible that Democrat Al Franken won thanks to illegal votes.4 If you’re very, very lucky (and extremely aggressive), you might just, once in a blue moon, be able to find enough fraudulent or erroneous votes to change the election outcome by a full 0.10%—but that’s only happened once this century!
Donald Trump’s shortest path to reversing the election outcome would have involved erasing his combined 65,009-vote margin in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and the Second District of Nebraska.5 He lost those races by 0.31%, 0.24%, 0.63%, and 6.50%, respectively. Put another way, he lost by three times the plausible margin that recounts or fraud can explain in Arizona, twice that margin in Georgia, six times the margin in Wisconsin, and sixty-five times the margin in Nebraska-2. It would have been a world-historic miracle for him to win any one of those on recount—and he had to win all four.
It is true that there was some fraud in 2020. It is highly likely that there was some fraud we never detected. It is definitely false that 2020 was “the most secure election in history,” as some claimed. (With all the last-minute changes and sudden mass-vote-by-mail, it was probably the least secure election since the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002.) It is also certainly true that the outcome was, in an important sense, “rigged” by unfair abuses of cultural and technical power, and also by courts that issued decrees under color of law that did not actually follow the letter of the law. Indeed, I basically agree with the thesis of Mollie Hemingway’s book (titled Rigged) as it has been explained to me. I think it is likely (though far from certain) that, in an alternate universe where the Left had none of those advantages, the voters would have chosen enough electors for Donald Trump to give him a second term.
However, at the end of the day, no matter how voters minds’ were manipulated by Zuck Bucks and the outrageous suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the voters cast ballots of their own free will. Their ballots were counted, tabulated, and reported. There may have been some undetected fraud, maybe even enough to move the needle by 0.05% in a few states, maybe even by 0.10% in one of them. But to flip three states and a district by more than twice that number? Nope.
Yes, compared to other presidential elections historically, the margin was very, very narrow. It was a very close election! However, in terms of historic cases of recounts and successful fraud investigations, Biden’s margin was immediately, obviously, insurmountably huge. Biden won even if you subtract a plausible number of votes for undetected fraud.
Hang on, though. All that margin stuff assumes that the 2020 election was like other elections. What if it wasn’t? What if 2020 was the year when the Left figured out how to coordinate large-scale voter fraud? What if they used their networks of officials and supporters in areas of strong Democratic support (in other words, big cities) in order to do a lot of fraud without getting detected? Couldn’t that swing a close statewide election by more than 0.10%? What if they found a way to secretly coordinate between enough key officials to fraudulently swing handful of purple-state races by 0.70%?
This would be the greatest heist in history. It would be all the more impressive for escaping detection by the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign and even the White House were scouring the entire country for evidence of fraud, with every official under intense pressure from the President to find some. They still came up empty. (I described some of this—and the inevitable conclusions drawn by senior Trump-appointed officials and allies—in the companion post, “The President’s Insurrection.”)
But maybe that’s just because the fraud was so very sophisticated!
First, I remind you that, as I mentioned above, fraud at that scale is significant enough that you can detect it using forensic mathematics, which is the coolest two-word phrase I know. You might be able to get away with the dead voting en masse and counties casting more votes than they have voters if you’re living in 1960, with limited public knowledge of statistics and a press thoroughly tamed by the Deep State.6 There are too many people today with Twitter followings who know Benford’s Law.
Nonetheless, you have lingering doubts. That brings us to the third way we know Biden won: there is a rock-solid consensus among election experts and media fact checkers.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, obviously I’m kidding, you should have seen your face there, though. Let’s try that again…
However, you have lingering doubts. That is not unreasonable! The media often lies to you—especially when they say things like, “the evidence is clear” or “the science is settled.” The “experts” are all professors, and all professors are Democrats.7 Media fact-checkers are often useful for gathering relevant sources, but their judgments are insanely skewed. No wonder you don’t trust these guys!
This brings us to the third way we know Biden won: the courts.
We are free to be frustrated—even furious—about the way in which Trump lost, especially the legal “errors” by blue-state Supreme Courts that expanded the franchise beyond what the law truly allowed.
However, like the blue-staters after the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, we are obliged to abide by the ballots that were cast under color of law, and by the results of the legal contest that followed. Remember, the blue-staters were just as convinced that Bush v. Gore was a legal error. Many of them still are. They still had to accept the final decision.8
There is a popular lie that the Trump cases were different, because the courts dismissed them all on mere technical grounds and never considered the actual election theft. This is false. Many were dismissed on technical grounds. Other cases were just nonsense and were dismissed for being incoherent. Yet some reached the merits. Trump got killed on nearly all of them, mostly in embarrassing ways for obvious reasons. It’s been three years since I read any of these, but, if memory serves, Constantino v. Detroit was a pretty typical humiliation on the merits for Team Trump. (Here’s a redder but more outdated source with better summary data.)
If you really think it’s possible that the Biden campaign ran some kind of large-scale fraud operation, and you (correctly) conclude that you can’t trust the media, I invite you to read some of these cases. I won’t try to guide your hand beyond pointing at Constantino as one example; you pick the cases yourself, however you like, and just read the judges’ decisions. (Look for documents marked “Opinion,” or, sometimes, “Order.”) I have an article about reading judicial opinions that should make this easy.
Or, if you just don’t have time or enough patience with legalese to wade through actual cases, read this book about how Trump lost in the courts, written by people who are not part of the Trump Conservative movement, but who certainly aren’t leftists by any stretch of the imagination.
The court cases, particularly those that reached the merits, are (with one or two exceptions) very convincing. You will see how the Trump campaign ginned up a lot of excitement about “evidence” for non-courtroom audiences on YouTube, but, when it came time to actually submit that evidence to a court, they frequently either got filleted by the judge, or declined to submit the evidence at all (because they knew they’d get filleted).
This isn’t just because of “lefty judges,” either. There could have been some of that, but many of the judges who ruled against Trump in these cases were appointed to the bench by Trump. It is nearly certain that at least some of the judges who ruled against Trump also voted for Trump in 2020. The Trump appointees were, at any rate, well-vetted conservatives with Federalist Society bona fides who believe in following the text of the Constitution, not their personal preferences.
Despite their natural political sympathies, though, they ruled against Trump in every case… except, to be fair, one case in Pennsylvania that Trump definitely deserved to win. (It had no meaningful impact on the final outcome in Pennsylvania.) Even the Supreme Court turned aside Trump’s petition to overturn the result,9 and this was the Court that overturned Roe v. Wade and handed down Bruen less than eighteen months later; they aren’t exactly in the Left’s pocket!
At this point, it’s hard to maintain that the election was stolen without starting to believe in a pretty remarkably far-reaching conspiracy: not only does it depend on corrupt Democrats agreeing to rig the election, not only does it depend on them developing a new technique for defrauding an election that nobody’s seen before and that can tip results by much larger margins than in the past, and to pull it off multiple times, in several swing states, without detection; it also depends on the complicity of dozens of federal judges, including some quite conservative judges.
If there were the slightest reason to doubt the final result of the election, do you really think Sam Alito would have held his tongue?
Even so, I’m still basically asking you to take somebody else’s word for it. Even if they are conservative judges, we live in an age where trust in institutions of all kinds has been obliterated—often for very good reasons. Wouldn’t it be best for you to be able to see for yourself?
That brings me to the fourth way we know Biden won: the demographics.
The core of the stolen-election theory runs something like this: Trump got enough votes to win, but the Democrats hated Trump so much that their voters and officials manufactured Biden votes (and shredded Trump votes) in deep blue counties, especially big cities, in order to pull ahead of Trump late in the night. Trump won Wisconsin, until Milwaukee officials realized Biden was losing and started creating fraudulent votes for Milwaukee. That’s how Trump himself has always described the big-picture of the theory. It does have a certain obvious plausibility. It’s not far off from the stories we all heard growing up about Mayor Daly stealing elections in Chicago. And Democrats really did hate Trump enormously.
However, if the election was stolen, this definitely isn’t how it was done.
We know this because of the demographics.
Trump actually did better in the cities in 2020 than he did in 2016. His margin among black voters was the best of any Republican since Bob Dole in 1996.10 He trounced McCain and Romney among Hispanics, drawing the best GOP Hispanic numbers since Bush 2004. Overall, he gained 2.1% in big cities compared to his 2016 result. He even gained a point in Indian Country, which is some of the toughest territory for Republicans.
If Trump’s performance in cities improved compared to 2016, then that probably isn’t because of fraud. It would be really weird for Milwaukee County officials to fake an election result by giving more votes to Trump than he got the last time. (Trump won 134,000 votes in Milwaukee County in 2020, but only 126,000 in 2016.)
Okay, maybe the ballot-stuffers didn’t destroy Trump votes. Maybe they only added Biden votes! After all, Clinton won Milwaukee County by 37%, but Biden won by 40%. That 3% gain in vote share is small but real.11 However, if the ballot-stuffers were adding more than enough Biden votes to counteract Trump votes, then why did Trump gain actual vote share in Philadelphia County? (Clinton won there by 67%, but Biden by only 63% — a gain of nearly 4% for Trump!) If they did do election fraud in Philly, it was the most incompetent fraud in history!
But, hang on, if Trump gained ground in some of the biggest Democratic strongholds on the map, while nearly holding his own in others, how the heck did he lose?
Trump lost because Biden consistently eroded Trump’s margins in the suburbs, the exurbs, and even in the rural Midwest. These erosions weren’t huge, and they didn’t generally flip the local results. For example, in 2016, Trump won the exurbs by 15 points! In 2020, he still won the exurbs… but, this time, only by 12 points. Trump won by the skin of his teeth in 2016. Add up these losses, and they outweigh his gains in the cities, and he loses the election.
Take Waukesha County, the very comfortable county composed of people who don’t want to live in Milwaukee. This Republican stronghold has delivered so many elections to Republicans at the eleventh hour that it became a global punchline. Trump won Waukesha County, by a very comfortable 21 points! Waukesha is MAGA country!
But he won it by 28 in 2016.
This pattern replicates itself everywhere. Donald Trump didn’t lose the election in the cities. He lost the election out in the sticks, in deep-red Republican territory, because a small but decisive fraction of Republicans who supported him in 2016 (and Romney in 2012 and McCain in 2008) decided at some point between 2016 and 2020 that they were fed up with Donald Trump. They voted for Biden.
“But hang on, James! We’re looking for fraud here! We can’t just assume these Waukesha County figures are accurate!”
Well, alright, fair enough, so let’s go with that. Our original theory was that local Democratic officials conspired with downtrodden urban voters to stuff a handful of dense urban ballot boxes, boosting Biden’s margin in the cities and giving him the extra votes he needed to win the election.
However, the crucial counties where Biden unexpectedly ate into Trump’s margins are Republican counties. So now our theory has to be that local Republican officials conspired with a bunch of well-to-do white people who are spread out across dozens of miles of sprawling exurban estates to stuff ballot boxes for Joe Biden, a candidate those same officials overwhelmingly… opposed? Why would they do this? Why, at the very least, would they cover up for it?
Maybe the Biden campaign paid them off? A cool $100,000 check deposited in a bank account will silence a lot of mouths.
If that’s so, though, why’d they do the same thing in Canadian County, Oklahoma? That’s another exurban county, very similar to Waukesha in a lot of ways… except that it’s in very nearly the reddest state in the Union. Trump won every county in Oklahoma, including the urban counties like Tulsa, and it was never remotely in play. Nevertheless, we see the same pattern: Trump won the county by 51 points in 2016, but by only 43 points in 2020. It’s ruby-red either way, and you wouldn’t look twice at it if you were just eyeballing an election map, but that erosion happened across the country.
This leaves us with two possible theories:
The Biden campaign faked this consistent suburban/exurban erosion in Trump support by suborning tens of thousands of county elections officials, ballot counters, and poll workers, the vast majority of them Republicans who publicly profess love for Trump, not just in the crucial states, but in a vast conspiracy that carpeted the land from sea to shining sea, and yet somehow didn’t leak at all, not even once, even as the White House scoured the country, searching for the slightest scrap of evidence of voter fraud. These faked suburban/exurban votes delivered Biden to the White House. OR:
During his time in office, President Trump alienated a small fraction of his former supporters, so they voted against him (or stayed home)—which, in a close election, was enough to make Biden the winner this time.
To me, the second theory is much more plausible on its face. It also fits with all the other evidence we have looked at.
I know that a sufficiently inventive theorist can always imagine a way to fit the evidence into the theory (rather than discarding a theory when it is defeated by the evidence), but, honestly, I would be interested in hearing the narrative where this theory makes anything like sense.
If we reject the theory that the Biden campaign blanketed Oklahoma and Wyoming with voter fraud in order to mask its implausibly difficult frauds in exurban Wisconsin, then we know that Biden won.
Unfortunately, the nature of this particular beast is that there is no way to answer every individual allegation in a single post. There are hundreds of allegations. Every time one is satisfactorily explained, two new ones pop up, plus one that you thoroughly and patiently addressed three months ago suddenly gets brought up again as though you never debunked it. The 2020 election discourse is one of the best examples I have ever seen of Brandolini’s Law:
The amount of energy needed to refute [an unfounded assertion] is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Even if you wrote an entire 77-page book explaining why we know Biden won, you would still only be able to address only most of only one facet of the election allegations. The vast majority of them are rubbish, but there are a lot of them, and the energy to explain them is an order of magnitude greater than the energy to come up with them!
You can usually double-check whether your own personal beliefs about the election are based on unfounded assertions as easily as picking one allegation you’re passionate about (say, “thousands of ballot mules were paid to illegally collect ballots and deliver them to drop boxes”), then finding three articles that agree with your beliefs and three that don’t.12 Read all six articles, then make a judgment.13 Too many of us are making judgments by only reading the ones from the side we already agree with.
I must confess that I am more than a little bit embarrassed by the Right’s difficulty accepting the news of our tough loss.
A lot of that comes from the top, of course. Many GOP voters trust Donald Trump more than they trust the media, the government, or the experts… and, given the track record those institutions have had lately, I can’t blame them. When Trump claims that he lost, he convinces a lot of people to just take his word for it. He ought to be more responsible. He ought to recognize the damage that false claims about an illegitimate election can do to a country, and make damn sure that what he’s saying is true before he says it.
Even so, it’s hard for me to accept that the Right has done worse on this than the Left did in 2000. In 2000, it has to be admitted: the Left had a lot more to complain about than we did in 2020. The election outcome was genuinely uncertain. It came down to one state, not three-plus. It was settled, not by near-unanimous rulings from a huge cross-section of the nation’s conservative and progressive judges, but by an extremely ugly 5-to-4 partisan split at the Supreme Court. The decision in that case, though I think it was essentially correct, was far more open to argument than the decisions in the 2020 cases. And Al Gore had won the national popular vote, which made it feel especially perverse for the close decision go to the guy who didn’t!
I’m a big believer in the electoral college. The college is a republican institution that shields us from the raw unfiltered will of the mob. However, when you’re into republican government, you have to accept the whole thing, not just the institutions that give you a momentary political advantage. It’s incoherent for us to say that “Trump really won the election” on the (baseless) theory that he “should” have won in the electoral college, while ignoring the fact that every other republican institution designed to shield us from the mob—state governments, courts, Congress, executive departments, law enforcements—has looked at the evidence and concluded that, no, Biden won the electoral college! (Biden also won the popular vote, by a much larger margin.)
Nevertheless, despite having a much better case than we do, the Left (correctly) accepted their loss. Al Gore conceded the election, stepped aside, and did not spend the next four years trying to get another chance to go after George Bush. Polls showed Democrats still furious about the 2000 election years later—a rage they’re entitled to—but they didn’t contest the certification. (Al Gore brutally gaveled down the few who tried.) They didn’t attack anything or anyone. By and large, they saw that Bush won, and did their level best to beat him in the next election.
Can we be at least as honorable in defeat as the Democrats?
I hope so, because, between you and me, I think the single most important thing in 2024 is defeating Joe Biden. I know my writing about Trump lately may make it look like I have TDS—and maybe I do!—but I recognize that Biden is the greater danger to the well-being of the people in this country, and I would never vote for him. I think it’s unconstitutional to vote for Trump, but I think it’s a sin to vote for Biden.14 So we have to win this election, guys!
I just don’t think we can do that if we’re still insisting, wrongly, that the last one was stolen. The rest of the country has moved on. It’s time for us to do the same.
EDIT 14 July 2024: The passage about Milwaukee County originally read:
If Trump’s performance in cities improved compared to 2016, then that probably isn’t because of fraud. It would be really weird for Milwaukee County officials to fake an election result by giving more votes to Trump than he got the last time. Even if they did do fraud there, it would be the most incompetent fraud in history!
But, hang on, if Trump gained ground in the biggest Democratic strongholds on the map, how the heck did he lose?
I updated it because commenter noticed that it was so misleading as to be wrong (if very technically true): Trump did gain votes in Milwaukee in absolute terms but not vote share. This article was written long enough ago that I don’t know what numbers I was looking at when I wrote this, nor what I was thinking, so I can’t account for the error. This point therefore demanded significant expansion—and a recognition that the argument is not as strong as I initially suggested. Thus the article as it now stands. Thanks again, Tarb!
UPDATE 2 January 2024: A reader pointed out to me that they also voted for vice-president: Harris got 306 votes, Pence 232, just like the presidential count. This is technically a separate vote, so, technically, presidential electors cast two votes during their single day in office, not one vote as the article claims.
There are absolutely no such allegations, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that Melvin Aanerud did a single thing wrong during his campaign to become one of Minnesota’s victorious presidential electors. I used him as my example for the very simple reason that he was at the top of my alphabetically-sorted list of electors.
Above roughly that threshold, voter fraud generally becomes detectable by the use of statistical tools, at least in statewide elections. (Major fraud in local elections is easier to coordinate and trickier to detect.) By using those statistical tools on the 2020 election, we can detect the absence of large-scale fraud.
However, the mere 341 votes identified in the linked article would not be enough to reverse Franken’s 225-vote margin unless the illegal voters broke 82% in favor of Al Franken, which is better than the typical Democrat does with felons and better than Franken did anywhere except in a tiny percentage of the bluest precincts in the very heart of Minneapolis. Either the Coleman campaign would have needed to prevent a lot more illegal votes, or it would have had to get really darned lucky with that particular batch of 341 illegal votes.
This is what people always forget: in any group of illegal ballots, some of the ballots are going to be cast for the candidate you don’t like and some will be cast for the guy you do like. These cancel one another out, remarkably fast. Even if one guy won the batch by a 60-40 landslide, 80% of those votes are cancelling one another out.
Because of those cancellations, these batches are almost always useless unless the race is very, very, very, very close. So it doesn’t matter a whit if you dig up some reason to cast doubt on some number of votes that’s coincidentally just larger than the victory margin, unless you can also show some compelling reason why 90%+ of those votes would have miraculously gone to only one candidate.
Unfortunately, people who cast doubt on votes all-too-rarely even bother with initial fact-checking and data verification, much less the actually important step of explaining how the votes could have changed the results. There are good guys out there, like the Minnesota Voters Alliance, but most of these people are hacks looking to stir outrage (and generate revenue) off convincing people (falsely) that the election was stolen from them.
The Democrats have the same class of grifters; look at the equally baseless claims that the 2016 election was stolen, or (if you’re An Old like me, the left-wing hysteria in 2004 about Diebold voting machines in Ohio supposedly “changing votes to Bush”).
Strictly speaking, Trump didn’t necessarily need the Second District of Nebraska. The problem is that, if he only got Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, he ended up with a 269-269 tie in the electoral college, which causes a contingent election in the House according to the (very strange) procedures laid out in the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi would be in control of that House, but Republicans would control more individual state delegations. (States in a contingent election vote by unit rule.) Trump very likely wins a contingent election—but, to guarantee the presidency, he needs a 270th electoral vote, which means he needs NE-2.
It helps if Richard Nixon, the man who was arguably cheated in 1960, is too patriotic to drag the country into the morass, and too contemptuous of “Latin American pipsqueaks” to give them the role model.
This is not quite true. My parents are professors, and so are many of their friends. They are certainly not Democrats… but they are a rounding error, and they all know it.
My mother—at a school that shall remain nameless to protect her identity—was just telling me today how horrifying it is to be on a campus where she is completely outnumbered by colleagues who openly defend or even celebrate the rape-and-slaughter massacre Hamas perpetrated in Israel over the weekend. This is at a nominally “Catholic” school, mind, so whatever she’s seeing is probably less horrifying than whatever’s happening at the secular schools!
Lots of them responded to Bush v. Gore by putting “Not MY President!” bumper stickers on the cars, though. On the principle that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, you are entitled to do the same today.
The case, termed Texas v. Pennsylvania, was a complicated and clearly last-ditch attempt by the Trump campaign to use Texas’s Republican administration to bypass the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. To be fair, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did a bad job in 2020! When I made all those indirect remarks earlier about courts abandoning the letter of the law in ways that distinctly helped Democrats? There were a few such courts, but the one I had in mind was the (very Democrat-heavy) Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
Trump had no way to win this case, and, even if he had won, the remedies he was pushing for wouldn’t have won him Pennsylvania, and, even if he had won Pennsylvania, it wouldn’t have changed the result of the election.
Nevertheless, I actually agree with the brief dissenting statement by Justices Thomas and Alito. Thomas and Alito expressly stated that they weren’t ruling for Trump, or expressing any opinion about his claims, but they believed that the Supreme Court was required to at least hear the case, because the case had triggered the Court’s original jurisdiction clause. Because the legal theory Trump was relying on in that case was so very weak, I think he would have lost unanimously at the hearing. He was essentially asserting a right for every state to meddle in the elections of every other state, even though Article II of the Constitution gives each state sole power to decide how to elect or appoint its electors. That would cut against everything Justices Thomas and Alito (and the other right-leaning judges) stand for.
12% is still not exactly winning the Black vote, but it’s still impressive that Trump made inroads where so many others failed.
It adds up to about 14,000 votes (459,723 * 3%). Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by 20,682 votes. Biden’s gains in Milwaukee County were therefore not decisive.
By looking at the New York Times election results and some racial demographics for Milwaukee, we can see that virtually all of Biden’s gains in the 414 came from majority-White precincts, which also happened to be Biden’s worst precincts in the county. This doesn’t disprove election fraud in Milwaukee County, but it certainly complicates the narrative.
Yes, I recognize that the search engines deliberately promote stories that align with one set of beliefs about the 2020 election, and it’s not because their side is right; it’s because it’s their side. We all saw what Big Tech did to the Hunter Biden stories. But that’s why I’m tell you to keep scrolling until you find three from each side. If you’re struggling to find articles from the Right—because Google suppresses some extreme websites on both sides of the spectrum—try visiting the Gateway Pundit or the Epoch Times.
However, note that I have never once yet read a wholly true story at the Gateway Pundit. I much prefer the National Review, The American Conservative, Law & Liberty, and the Washington Examiner for more level-headed right-wing analysis. (Disclaimer: two of those have, in the past, paid me money.)
When it comes to the 2020 Election, reading both sides will mostly help Republicans come to recognize the truth. However, when it comes to beliefs about the covid shutdowns, the efficacy of mask mandates, the wisdom of America’s anomalous child-vaccination guidance for covid, and the probable origin of covid in a Chinese lab, reading both sides will mostly be a wakeup call for Democrats. I’m just saying, we all have our blind spots, so let’s not be too hard on one another about having them, but instead commit to doing a better job checking them.
Thus, if Biden and Trump are the two main candidates, I will be unable to vote for either. I will not intentionally violate the Constitution, even to prevent a different monster from taking office.
There are a lot of good points in this, but I have a few qualms about the argument that Trump did better in the Democratic/urban areas and worse in the Republican/rural ones, which cost him the election. If true, this is an extremely powerful argument. But there's something you claim that I'm not sure is right:
"If Trump’s performance in cities improved compared to 2016, then that probably isn’t because of fraud. It would be really weird for Milwaukee County officials to fake an election result by giving more votes to Trump than he got the last time. Even if they did do fraud there, it would be the most incompetent fraud in history!"
Looking at the results in Milwaukee County, in 2016, I see 126,069 (28.58%) for Trump, 288,822 (65.48%) for Hillary, and 26,162 (5.94%) for other candidates. In 2020, we see 134,482 (29.25%) for Trump, 317,527 (69.07%) for Biden, and 7,714 (1.68%) for other candidates. And it is true that Trump got more votes and a higher percentage this time. But Biden also got more votes and a higher percentage, and got a bigger percentage increase. So does this really demonstrate that there was no fraud, given that Biden made out better than Trump did? I don't believe there was fraud, but I'm not so sure how well this example serves.
Hi James. I appreciate your exhaustive list of reasons why we can know with certainty that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a fact I never had reason to doubt.
However, I have to take issue with your statement that "it's a sin to vote for Joe Biden". I don't think it can ever be a sin to vote for any particular candidate so long as you are reasonablly knowledgeable about the candidate (and not simply his stated positions) and you are doing so for reasons that are not sinful.
And there is a great non-sinful reason to vote for Joe Biden: as you correctly observice, Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution. More directly, he is an enemy of the Constitution.
I once served in the US Army. I still consider myself bound my my oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic". (God help us, I never thought the last 2 words were anything but a formality).
There is a separate reason that voting for Joe Biden in 2024 is less onerous than voting for him in 2020: The Dobbs decision, the culmination of 49 years of prayer and effort, put the protection of the unborn back into play, making realistic progress possible. I can't imagine a future Court trying to reinstate the legal mess of Roe/Casey even if Biden is lucky enough to replace 2 originalists with 2 liberals.
But I can all too easily imagine what Trump could do if he gets another term. I'm pretty sure you can, too.