Who Won?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, November 08, 2020

 

Donald Trump thinks he won the election. He also thinks that the reason it looks like he may not have won the election is massive voting fraud. At least, he says he thinks that. He said he won the so-called popular vote in 2016, too, and the only reason that it looked like he didn’t was massive voting fraud. Donald Trump would stroke out if he tried to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth for 22 consecutive minutes, and so no serious person takes him seriously on the subject of vote fraud. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t fraud; it means you can’t count on the president of the United States to tell the truth. He surely is not going to tell the truth about losing the election to a man he insisted was one part mob boss and one part eggplant.

 

Joe Biden thinks he won the election. The Associated Press thinks he won, too. But the landslide some of his friends (and provisional friends) were predicting did not come to pass. His showing against the man he insisted was obviously and self-evidently the worst president in the history of these United States is not what one would have expected running against a man who was obviously and self-evidently the worst president in the history of these United States. He very well may end up having eked out a very slim win only to spend his time in office having his ideas, to the modest extent that he has ideas, ruthlessly smothered to death by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. Biden did not exactly sell his immortal soul to the Left in order to unify the party behind him, but he did give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders a long-term lease on it, with excellent terms, which may have been a bad bargain: He got into bed with a clutch of self-declared socialists and then lost bigly in Florida as Latinos with some intimate experience of that wretched ideology said: ¡Socialismo, no! Biden will be faced with a choice between hobbling his own agenda by knuckling under to the battiest Berkeleyest nut-cutlets or throwing the Left under the bus and wonder where Kamala Harris is hiding the icepick.

 

Mitch McConnell thinks maybe he won the election. Democrats had high hopes for the extravagantly funded challenger Cocaine Mitch just wiped off his windshield. But that was no surprise. And with both David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler heading for runoffs, the canny McConnell has an excellent chance of giving Democrats in Georgia the worst beating they’ve had since Sherman.

 

Chuck Schumer does not think he won the election.

 

Nancy Pelosi thinks she won the election. Her party lost seats in the House in a year in which its members had expected to rout the opposition, but Democrats didn’t lose enough seats to cost Pelosi the speakership. If the speaker’s gavel and her splendid collection of Hermès scarves are all the octogenarian Pelosi cares about, then she has every reason to be satisfied.

 

But her caucus members don’t think they won the election. They think a lot of them got their asses handed to them in races they’d expected to win. Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, was speaking for many of her colleagues with her profane tirade against ridiculous proposals for defunding the police and loose talk of socialism. “Don’t say socialism ever again,” she thundered. “If we run this race again we will get f*****g torn apart again in 2022.” Pelosi bitterly disagreed: “We have a mandate!” she insisted. It sure doesn’t seem to feel like a mandate to congressional Democrats. Perhaps Pelosi is ready for a tapioca and bingo mandate in a quiet, sunny place.

 

Trump allies think they won the election. The president may not have made it over the finish line (they are not quite ready to concede that), but he improved on his 2016 performance in important ways, showed himself to be persistently competitive in states and counties long written off as hopeless by the best minds of the GOP, and, after four years of being denounced as a white supremacist, turned in the best showing among nonwhite voters of any Republican nominee since Richard Nixon—and that’s 1960 Richard Nixon, fresh off of the civil-rights advances of the Eisenhower administration, not sweaty, scheming, 1972 Richard Nixon. Trump won 96-percent Latino counties in Texas but also increased his share of the vote in Los Angeles County, his share of the black vote, and his share of the gay vote. Pointy-headed Republican political consultants spent decades obsessing over expanding the coalition beyond angry white guys, and Trump obliged by bringing in more black men, more black women, more Latinos from Florida to Texas to California, etc. He did this during a horrifying epidemic and after a nasty economic downturn. They won’t say it out loud, because they don’t want to push the chief out on an ice floe just yet, but surely many Trump allies are imagining what Trumpism might accomplish under the leadership of someone with a little bit of discipline and a less adolescent social-media regimen.

 

Conservative Trump critics don’t think we won the election. That may turn out to be the only thing we’re right about this November.