November, 2020 - Joe Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States this month, decisively defeating Donald Trump in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Mr. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Mr. Trump's 232, the exact reverse of 2016's results. Following the 2016 election, Mr. Trump had called his 306 electoral votes a "landslide", even though it was not a landslide by historical standards and even though he had lost the popular vote. We're tempted to jokingly follow suit with the same characterization this year, but will stick to calling Mr. Biden's win a decisive one.

The change in the 2020 electoral results was due to Mr. Biden's having flipped five states that Mr. Trump won in 2016: the three traditionally Democratic states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, (which Mr. Trump surprisingly, but barely, won in 2016), plus Georgia and Arizona. Mr. Biden was the first Democrat to win Georgia and Arizona since Bill Clinton's success there in the 1990's.

(image from ilaunion.org)
This year's popular vote counts (updated as of December 4) show the former Vice President with more than a 7 million vote lead over Mr. Trump, which equates to almost a 4.5% margin of victory. Hillary Clinton had defeated Mr. Trump by over 2.8 million votes in 2016, a 2.1% margin. Mr. Biden's 4.5% victory is on par with the ~5% national margin that the average of pre-election polling had projected.

Unfortunately, though, and unlike all his predecessors who have been defeated in Presidential races, Mr. Trump has refused to concede defeat and to congratulate Mr. Biden. Instead, he has been promoting the false narrative that massive voter fraud cost him the election.

No one but the most rabid and ill-informed of Trump supporters could actually believe these lies. Even Mr. Trump, who likely is the most insecure and fragile individual ever to hold the office of the Presidency, probably knows his conspiracy theories are untrue. Here's why:

For one, Mr. Trump's public history has shown he is not psychologically capable of admitting he ever could be wrong or could lose at anything. Secondly, we suspect that his propensity for grifting anyone, even those who admire him, has led him to view his defeat as an opportunity to scam his supporters once again by asking them for additional campaign contributions, ostensibly to fight his election defeat in court. Some reports already indicate this money is being used to pay down campaign debts, though, not to hire competent legal representation and investigators. More cynically, others expect this money will be used to help fund the repayment of large loans Mr. Trump's businesses have coming due in the next few years.

(image of Mr. Trump's Thanksgiving press conference from Reuters)

As to the substance of Mr. Trump's various conspiracy theories surrounding the election, rest assured they are not true. Some started with the procedural changes put in place due to the large mail-in voting this year. Others took the usual handful of errors that occur in every election and blew them up, with no evidence, to imply widespread fraud. What follows are results of Mr. Trump's court cases, statements by prominent Republicans who dispute Mr. Trump's public arguments, and facts pertaining to some of the Trump allegations:

To date, the Trump team has lost all but one of the 40+ court cases they have filed. His lawyers (those who haven't already opted to drop out) have provided no evidence of fraud in court and have argued only that, in some fashion, the process of counting votes was flawed and, therefore, hundreds of thousands of Mr. Biden's votes should be thrown out. Even federal judges Mr. Trump appointed have called these arguments baseless and the U.S. Supreme Court has refuseed to hear the two cases brought to them.
Manual re-counts of votes in Wisconsin and Georgia have only changed the final results by a few hundred votes in each state, with Mr. Biden actually increasing his vote count in Wisconsin.
Republican Governors Ducey of Arizona and Kemp of Georgia, plus Georgia's GOP Secretary of State Raffensperger (all of whom are on record as having voted for Mr. Trump), have certified their state's vote for Mr. Biden, saying that the vote was fair and not affected by any fraud. Mr. Biden's margin of victory in these two states was smaller than in any of the other states he won.

(Raffensperger image from Ga. Public Broadcasting)
U.S. Attorney General William Barr stated on December 2nd that the Justice Department and the FBI also have found no evidence of fraud in this year's election.
One of the Trump team's favorite public arguments has been that hundreds of thousands of Biden votes "mysteriously showed up overnight" after the election. In fact, these were mail-in votes that took hours and even days to count. (Across the country, mail-in votes went heavily for Mr. Biden, as Republicans tended to follow Mr. Trump's request to vote in person, not via mail.) In Pennsylvania specifically, the GOP-controlled state legislature did not allow the counting of mail-in votes to begin until Election Day. In Michigan, processing of mail-in ballots could start the day before, but could not be tabulated until Election Day.

Consequently, let's stop getting people riled up by repeating the Trump team's lies that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump. Rather, let's congratulate Mr. Biden on his decisive victory and let's move forward addressing the problems our nation is facing.

As for other election results, the Democrats gained one seat in the U.S. Senate, with two Senate runoffs in Georgia scheduled for January 5th. (By the way, if voter fraud in Georgia led to the Biden victory, why didn't the Dems also win at least one of these two Senate races?) At the moment, Republicans hold a 50-48 seat advantage in the Senate, but if the Democrats can win both Georgia races, Democrats will control the chamber as the Vice President casts all tie-breaking votes.

In the U.S. House, Democrats remain in control, although they did lose a handful of seats. Those losses occurred in traditionally Republican districts or districts that Republican state legislators had gerrymandered to favor the GOP, but the Democrats had somehow managed to win in the 2018 "Blue Wave" election.

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