The People Picked Joe Biden as Our President. Will Donald Trump and His GOP Accept That?
Joseph Robinette Biden is the president-elect. We know the will of the people, and, although it was a gut-wrenching week, the final tally is not all that close. In the popular vote, Biden, with the most votes of any candidate in history, leads Donald Trump by close to 3 million votes, a number that will grow as more of always slow-moving California gets toted up. And in terms of electoral votes, it looks like the number might be 306—maybe less, if Arizona doesn’t hold, maybe more, if somehow North Carolina goes the way of Georgia once they start counting absentees. But the point is, it won’t be a mere 270 or 271.
Whatever the number ends up at, the people have spoken. Yes, a lot of states were close. But a lot of states were close in 2016, too; besides which, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. But he never allowed for an instant that his victory was anything less than legitimate. And under the rules, that was his right. Even I grudgingly acknowledged it at the time, writing that “it was Trump who won in a dubious way—although I cannot, alas, say that it wasn’t in a way the Founders intended.”
Biden will have won a victory that was similar to Trump’s in electoral terms (Trump won 304 electoral votes), but with the added moral backup that he will be the clear winner, by maybe 4 percent or more, of the popular vote. In a country as divided as ours, 4 percent isn’t that close. So the will of the people here is clear.