Early gift for Republicans
Finally, the charade is over. Wild conspiracy theories have been put to pasture. Incoherent ravings of a commander-in-chief with a presidential-sized inferiority complex are soon to be history. And finally — thank God — the dragged-out-waytooelection is in the books. In casting its ballots on Dec. 14, the Electoral College effectively certified Joe Biden as the next president. Now that Donald Mr. Trump’s legal challenges have been exhausted — including a shootdown by the U.S. Supreme Court — the overall results of the 2020 election can be analyzed free of white noise about rigged ballots and stolen elections. No analysis would be complete without mentioning the president. This column has already detailed why and how he lost. Simply put, it was a self-inflicted defeat born of arrogance and attitude, combined with the worst campaign in history. Bottom line: Had Mr. Trump exercised just a modicum of restraint while employing common sense, he would have been re-elected in an electoral landslide. Those larger margins would have easily been enough to overcome any “suitcases stuffed with Biden ballots” that may have shown up at 3 a.m. in swing states.
Good coaches tell their teams to be up big in the final quarter, so that bad calls won’t affect the outcome. That’s not always possible, of course. But in the president’s case, not only was it possible to be ahead of Mr. Biden in the states that mattered, but it should have been a “gimme.”
The president has no one to blame but himself.
It’s bad enough that he didn’t combat the pandemic effectively, given that he was late to the party, chose politics over science, and downplayed it from Day One — at a time when people and businesses were dying.
One would have thought the president would have learned his lesson — that COVID was the real deal — by taking a leadership position, even in defeat. Instead, he went silent and deep, surfacing only to play golf while millions were contracting the virus. Most maddening was listening to the president take credit for the vaccines, when, in fact, Pfizer took no U.S. government money for the development, clinical trials and manufacturing of its compound.
For all the good policy decisions Donald Trump made (and there were many), his choice to act un-presidentially did him in. Par for the course, he has never acted so disgracefully than in the time since the election.
Yes, the president lost, but that’s far from the whole story. He garnered more votes than any other candidate in history (save for Joe Biden), adding millions to his 2016 totals. Mr. Trump’s significant inroad into both the Latino and black communities was a harbinger for future elections, as the GOP’s roadmap to success lies in broadening its appeal to those constituencies. And he made states competitive again — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — that hadn’t been since the 1980s, while bringing new people of all political stripes into the fold.
Ironically, we saw a reverse “coat-tail” effect, where downticket Republicans won but the president succumbed. The results unequivocally show that Nov. 3 was not a widespread rejection of Donald Trump’s policies, but a repudiation of the man, and only the man. The positions Mr. Trump advocated won the day - funding the police; a strict-constructionist Supreme Court; lower taxes and fewer regulations; tighter border control; get-tough with China; a non-interventionalist foreign policy; and a war on political correctness.
Republican ideas prevailed, proving that it’s not what you say, but how you say it.
The most under-reported election story is the Democrats’ colossal failure to flip state legislative chambers (especially in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina). Because 2020 is a census year, whatever party controls state legislative chambers is the one that will largely determine congressional redistricting — immensely important given its decade-long implications.
Assuming that at least one Republican wins in Georgia, the balance of power in Washington will have dramatically shifted to the Right. President Biden will be forced to nominate moderate judges, Speaker Pelosi’s radical agenda is DOA, and none of the laws signed by Donald Trump (such as corporate and personal tax cuts) will be abolished.
The election day messages are clear: Americans overwhelmingly favor Republican policies of limited government, low taxes and personal freedoms, but they want their leaders to exude civility when instituting them.
With that in mind, the Republican casting call for 2024 begins now.