“I have a feeling that if Trump wins, Hillary supporters will be sad,” leftist writer Sally Kohn tweeted on Election Day in 2016. “If Hillary wins, Trump supporters will be furious. An important difference.” Kohn has been proven wrong this year about her own side, which has moved to angrily delegitimize Donald Trump’s victory. She was also wrong in her obvious assumption – shared by store owners who boarded up their windows – that Trump supporters would react to his defeat as violently as the Black Lives Matter movement reacted to the deaths in Minneapolis.
That’s not to say that Trump and many of his supporters are responding gracefully to their candidate’s failure to repeat his 2016 feat of winning the presidency by 77,736 votes in three key states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania). They take little comfort in the fact that Joe Biden’s margin of victory in this year’s three key states (Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin) was an even smaller 43,809 votes.
While Trump reluctantly acknowledged that he would have to concede to the White House on Inauguration Day, he did not discourage his lawyers and others from trying to somehow overturn the result. None of them even came close to identifying errors that would justify overturning the result in a single state, much less the three necessary to reverse the result.
This shouldn’t be surprising. When there is a very slim popular vote margin in one state whose electoral votes are decisive, the results will be hotly contested, as was the case in Florida in 2000. The final official margin was just 537 votes.
That’s significantly lower than the 77,736 or 43,809 or 118,601 that George W. Bush used to secure key electoral votes in Ohio in 2004. Overturning earlier narrow electoral vote majorities would require successfully challenging the popular vote margin of 18,488 in two states in 1976, from 317,742 votes in seven states in 1968, and in 1960 33,538 votes in four states. This is one of the reasons why losing candidates did not contest the results.
Another reason is that we have – or had – a norm against delegitimizing election results. In 1960, Richard Nixon chose to follow this norm and not challenge the results in many states. In 2000, Al Gore challenged the Florida election results, but after a final court ruling, he relented and stepped away from electoral politics to pursue his own advocacy.
Not so in 2016.
In violation of longstanding norms, the Obama administration’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies spied on the opposition party’s campaign. Officials presented Steele’s suspicious dossier to the FISA court without disclosing that it was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
In violation of long-standing norms, Democrats refused to accept the result as lawful. “I won’t agree to this. I will resist,” liberal think tank leader Neera Tanden (President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget) wrote on Twitter five days after the election. Democrats began calling themselves the “resistance,” suggesting that the Trump administration was morally equivalent to the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France.
Time and time again, leading Democrats – Hillary Clinton, Republican Jerrold Nadler, the late Republican John Lewis, Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter – have called Trump an “illegitimate” president. For three years, Democrats promoted the Russia collusion hoax without finding or producing any evidence except the discredited Steele dossier.
Joe McCarthy had a lame excuse that at one point there were several communists in the State Department. Democrats and their many media allies lacked a similar excuse to promote the Russia collusion hoax.
So you can find polls that show a majority of Democrats think Trump is an “illegitimate” president and Russians hacked election sites, and polls that show a majority of Republicans think Biden stole the election for with the connivance of election officials in many states.
Prominent commentators who have ruthlessly and respectfully pointed out the patently absurd and fanciful accusations of Russian collusion deplore this state of affairs. They are calling on everyone to heed Joe Biden’s call to “unite” the nation.
They’re right. Democrats have misbehaved for four years by trying to delegitimize Donald Trump’s 77,736-vote victory. Donald Trump and many Republicans behaved inappropriately for four weeks in an attempt to delegitimize Joe Biden’s victory of 43,809 votes.
The conservative National Review rightly condemns Trump’s “disgraceful end.” Yet her liberal counterparts have done little or nothing to condemn Democrats’ shameful disregard for long-standing norms. A few leftist writers – Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi – reacted sharply and separated themselves from their institutional affiliations.
Democrats, dismayed that many Americans do not humbly accept the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, are learning a lesson they learned a long time ago. You reap what you sow.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
