Friday, November 27, 2020

He's a Magic Man

J.B. Shurk at The Federalist notes that it's most peculiar that the media is not talking more about Joe Biden's absolutely astonishing political accomplishment in winning the recent election.

The word "incredible" seems an inadequate description of Biden's victory. Despite never having accomplished much during his 47 year career in politics, despite scarcely campaigning for the presidency, despite showing signs of cognitive impairment, despite generating scarcely any excitement, Mr. Biden nevertheless received the most votes in American history, 15 million more than Barack Obama.

But there's much more to Mr. Biden's astounding feat. As Shurk points out, the Democrats were clobbered in the down-ballot races, but still gave Mr. Biden a victory at the top of the ticket, defeating an incumbent who actually gained 10 million more votes than he won in 2016 - the first time in history an incumbent actually gained votes and still lost.

He goes on to observe that,
Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now that’s historic! In 2020, The Cook Political Report and The New York Times rated 27 House seats as toss-ups going into Election Day. Right now, Republicans appear to have won all 27.

Democrats failed to flip a single state house chamber, while Republicans flipped both the House and Senate in New Hampshire and expanded their dominance of state legislatures across the country.
Now that's a breathtaking display of political prowess from a man who sometimes forgot where he was and which office he was running for. But that's not all. For the first time in history a candidate for president won despite losing both Florida and Ohio. He also won despite losing big in almost all of the "bellwether" counties in the country. Shurk writes:
Of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years, President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington.

Whereas the former VP picked up Clallam by about three points, President Trump’s margin of victory in the other 18 counties averaged over 16 points. In a larger list of 58 bellwether counties that have correctly picked the president since 2000, Trump won 51 of them by an average of 15 points, while the other seven went to Biden by around four points.
Here's another staggering aspect to Mr. Biden's masterful performance:
Polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll...noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Washington Post election analyst Robert Barnes...added that in those “big cities in swing states run by Democrats...the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” In the states that mattered most, so many mail-in ballots poured in for Biden from the cities that he put up record-breaking numbers and overturned state totals that looked like comfortable leads for President Trump.
Who says miracles don't happen? Biden's wonder-working power rivals even that of Jesus who famously raised the dead and fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

As Mr. Shurk concludes, "Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out."

It is indeed interesting, but perhaps the lack of curiosity on the part of the anti-Trump media can be attributed to their unspoken incredulity that Biden is really the political magician he'd have to have been to honestly pull this off. Prudence dictates that an attainment so implausible, so apparently miraculous, when accomplished by the man one desperately hopes will win, is best left unquestioned.

It's bad form, after all, to ask the magician how he managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat.