It may be years before we really have a full understanding as to what really happened in the 2020 American national election.  It will considerably sooner than that, baring some spectacular unforeseen discovery regarding the integrity of the vote, that Joseph Biden will be certified the winner of the Presidential election, having laid claim, by far, to the most votes for President in the history of American election history.  Frankly, with the count continuing at this time, Biden has accumulated almost 10 million more votes than the previously most prodigious vote collector for President, 2008’s Barack Obama.  Barack Obama, a uniquely attractive candidate presenting as a historic first in the country, will now no longer even be second highest.  That place will be held by the presumptive loser of 2020, President Trump whose 73 million votes will be four million more than Obama’s 2008 total.    In a country that has consistently averaged 55% to 60% eligible voters casting ballots in the last 8 previous national elections, 2020 is on path to see 72%.  States such as my Wisconsin may see 90% eligible voters voting.  It seems that the race between a 74 year old irascible demon in Trump and a 78 year old establishment pol who barely campaigned in Biden created a level of enthusiasm exclaimed through voting never before seen in American history.  In the Age of Covid, it seems the real secret to Americans fully participating in their democracy is a full blown pandemic.

The results of this massive turnout defied all polling.  The polls not only got things wrong, they got things historically wrong.  For weeks, polls conclusively showed a blue wave – a massive Biden victory of 8-12% popular vote, electoral college landslide, probable flipping of the Senate to Democrat control, and a gain of up to 25 seats in the House of Representatives were projected.  Instead, a vote differential of 100,000 votes in four states may prove the difference between a Biden and Trump Presidency, the Senate nominally remains in Republican hands pending the result of two run off Senate elections in Georgia, Republicans have gained between 10 and 15 seats putting Nancy Pelosi Speakership in peril, and not a single state house legislature converted from republican to democrat.  The blue wave, in a spectacular, historically high vote,  became a blue drubbing.  A serious disconnect between the ability to take the pulse of the electorate through profiled polls  has come to full realization with the 2020 vote.

So what have we learned from the apparent repudiation of President Trump as the leader of the country and the massive support for the party realizing his agenda throughout the land?  What have we learned about ourselves, subtly woven in between the lines of narrative  driven by an ever more biased social elite and their media that spend four years working ceaselessly to drive the stake in the Trump phenomena?

The electoral process has become corrupted: The steady conversion over the past 200 years of a nation organized originally as a republic into a country driven progressively and overwhelmingly by blunt democratic tools has eroded the careful balance that secured the integrity of the American political experience.  Integrity has been under assault after assault with weakening of the bond between the discerning voter and their ballot.   Once a process oriented to voters with direct stake in process, the expansion of the voting rolls to “count every vote” has led to increasing loosening in the weight of a voting decision on election day.  Variability of requirement for proof of identification, shortening of residency period, lack of confirmation of up to date voting rolls, same day registration,  overturning of legislative standards by court rulings within days of the election, and loosening of absentee rules has almost completely subsumed the one person one vote accuracy that has been the traditional election standard assuring the presumption of integrity of outcome regardless of party.  In 2020, the steady drip of corruption of the election day concept reached a zenith with mail in balloting, extended over months, allowing for a rich environment for ballot harvesting.  Sold as a necessity of the Covid crisis defining in person electoral actions “unsafe”, a tsunami of mail in ballots were sent out state after state using addresses of voters unfiltered for the out of state residency, subsequently moved, or even the dead months prior to the election.  Defined as easily the most at risk method of voting based upon international democratic standards for voting integrity and the risk of corrupted ballots, states used Covid as the excuse to flood massive quantities of ballots to unseen individuals.  According to the American Spectator, 2.6 million of the 3.1 million mail in ballots sent out in the key swing state of  Pennsylvania were cast for the election – almost 90% of all ballots sent out.  Mail-in votes historically have had high percentages of ballots thrown out for inappropriate identification and other issues.  In the 2020  New York primary, fully 14% were thrown out for such reasons.  In Pennsylvania for the national election of 2020 – 0.3% were thrown out of the count. That’s  0.3%.  In each of the crucial swing states, mail in voting created massive after hours swings in the voting tally on November 3rd, long after the closed polls should President Trump with commanding leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, and particularly Pennsylvania.  Internationally, democracies have moved away from using mainstream mail in voting for its inherent corruptibility.  The United States created the most massive electoral mail in whirlwind in 2020 and it determined the outcome of the Presidential election.  Historians will have to decide if the outcome was corrupted in a manner that subverted the will of the people.  What is the extent of effort to support permanently this conversion in electoral standards in the United States?  Search Google for mail in vote fraud in the United States election, and the top ten searches will state how it didn’t occur.  Google doth protest too much.

Money now rules the roost:  The 2020 US national election broke all records for spending by the political parties. Over 14 billion dollars were spent in the election to support candidates, twice what was spent in 2016, and 6.6 billion of it on the Presidential election.  Democrats outspent Republicans over 2 to 1.  William Proxmire, Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1957 to 1989, re-elected a staggering 5 times, ‘in his last two campaigns refused contributions and spent only 200 dollars on his re-election paperwork and mailing back unsolicited contributions’ (wikipedia).  The Democrat challenger to Lindsey Graham in South Carolina 2020 Senate race spent over 100 million dollars – losing by the race by 10%.   The Democrat challenger to Mitch McConnell in Kentucky spent 75 million to lose by 20 % points.  Money was so flush that Joe Biden maintained almost universal imprint in front of the voting population despite hardly campaigning in person anywhere for the three months prior to the election.  The massive investment in Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media sites was married to an almost wall to wall radio and television ad coverage and a media presentation that secured better than 90% negative Trump stories through the election period.  Money poured in from every conceivable deep pockets contributor into almost every conceivable race.  Mike Bloomberg bragged he spent almost 150 million dollars in Florida alone targeting Trump’s defeat.  Other billionaires poured through every loophole in soft money to assure their will.  The investment may have been the difference at the top of the ticket in defeating Trump.  That will likely be enough a learned lesson to help the rich elite forget the abysmal return on their dollars in the rest of the election.

America is changing:  The generation of baby boomers that has dominated American politics for 30 years reached its expiration date with the 2020 election.   This may sound oxymoronic having apparently just voted in the oldest President in the history of the United States at 78 years of age, but Biden’s presumptive victory truly defines the end.  Biden’s price for being selected for candidacy  was his willingness to be a passive foil for the real modern energy of the party, staying in his basement, declaring no detail or principles to be judged upon, engaging in no campaign rallies and selecting the most left leaning senator in his party for the vice presidential slot.  Despite his often bombastic braggadocio in regard to his career, he will find little ground to define a separate agenda from the younger, aggressive inner circle who pulled him across the finish line.  The eighty year old Speaker of the House Pelosi previously discovered this sad reality with her inability to control her caucus in the House of Representatives, resulting in a sharp leftward turn, and the subsequent sacrifice of multiple so called moderate democrats in the 2020 election.  Biden and Pelosi have received their lifetime achievement medals in the election results, and I expect a rapid loss of influence for both as they try to subvert the revolution, and are cast aside.

There are multiple other signs of a changing America, no more so then the dramatic infusion of black and hispanic votes in support of Trump.  The initial statistics suggest up to 18% of black males and over 34% of Hispanics were part of the Trump voting wave.  Despite four years of the media’s hysterical accusations of a supposed “racist” core of Trump defining his decisions, and Trump’s bombastic call for containing the border risking the alienation of hispanic voters,  a dramatic conversion of multi-ethnic voters to America First philosophy as evidenced by the stunning Trump support was instead the lesson of 2020.  The Democrat Party has placed everything on the victim card and the need to divide America into ever more socially segregated tribes. Hyphen- America was designed to be future majority of inter-sectionalized victim groups connected only by their supposed hyphenated  alienation from the promise of America – African-American, Hispanic-American, Gay American, Trans-American, Female American, etc.  The saving force sold by Democrats was that in socialist equality of outcome, all the inherent inequities would be more fairly adjudicated by a just government rather than the vagaries of individual differences and available destinies.  Prominently, the first crack in the fifty year wall of African American voter uniform fealty to the ‘government party’ showed real movement in 2020 as a burgeoning middle class in the black community no longer wanted their individual success defined by others as owed to others, rejecting the quid pro quo.  Hispanic Americans rebelled against the condescending attitude of Democrat elites that suggested that the common root Spanish language automatically linked all cultures philosophically.  Cuban and Venezuelan descendants in Florida, having escaped miserable conditions forced upon them in their socialist homelands were in no mood to see their American homeland stumble into the same tired claptrap of the socialist mantra.   Those of Mexican descent in Texas swung hard toward Republicans as they soured on the constant influx of new illegals that threatened their hard won individual gains.  No longer interested in being categorized, multiple ethnic groups pushed toward Republican identification as they defended the American promise as they lived it.  More and more identified with an incentive to shed their hyphenated prison, and express their individualism as Americans, culturally linked to their past, but ever more American in their forward thinking.   The result of the election was a new Republican core, multi-ethnic, middle class, and more linked to the American promise than the sclerotic party itself had ever recently self identified.  The Washington elites of both parties and the traditional Democrat strategies that had assumed the class distinctions and party loyalties were forever had their preconceptions shattered.  The effects of Trump’s audacious smashup of assumptions regarding Americans, America, and its trajectory in the world will far outlive the result of the election.

The Age of Trump:  Whether the election is eventually certified for Biden or not, the winner will be… Trump.   Trump’s effect on the American political scene is unlike any politician since Reagan.  The massive crowds that came out to be part of the experience of the peculiar Trump phenomena are unlike any previous populist iteration in that they meet and share their mutual enthusiasm whether Trump is there or not.  The massive idolatry of Obama required his physical achievement of having succeeded at breaking the glass ceiling minorities felt defined the Presidency,  and disappeared the second he left the position of power.  The halting semblance of the Tea Party movement of 2010 was a mere foreshadowing of the massive and ever continuing Trump wave.  Truck and boat rallies and Trumpathons were spontaneously organized and self driven through social media, to the horror of elites, who could not control the width and breath of the organic enthusiasm for what Trump had unleashed.  What the gathering hordes found most attractive in Trump was his utter lack of contrived organization, and his completely open invitation to Anyone to take part, regardless of society’s applied label,  who wanted to believe in the American promise again.   He was seen as relentlessly fighting for them.  His probable loss only reinforces the image he has cultivated, that elites were out to get him to prevent him from succeeding in accomplishing the rebirth of the American promise that millions wanted to once again live out.  His ‘break eggs to get things done” oversized personality  horrified the traditional moribund inhabitants of Washington – but was recognized by millions as to having actually got things done as he had promised.  Reagan had organized his thoughts regarding the epic struggle with Communism into the most simple of concepts – “We win, they lose” – and pulled off the impossible in less than a decade.  Trump understood better than anyone has since Reagan the power of simple direct messaging – exclaiming “When you win, We win”, and millions have taken up the mantle.  The chance of anyone reducing Trump’s influence on this ever larger American phenomena with or without him in the White House is between slim and none, and slim left town.

The American Promise:  155 million American voters have now joined the battle.  Which America comes out of the 2020 electoral experience and the Covid pandemic ?   A surrender of individualism and uniquely American virtues of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the shared social global contract of the collective?  A rebirth of the strength of each individual’s contribution and opportunity to control their own destiny?  It is clear that the assumed arc toward an ever more “progressive” future of subservience for security is no longer accepted as inevitable by all. Whatever happens, we are likely entering a tumultuous  period, where echoes of Lincoln’s premonition that a divided house can not  stay divided – it must become all  one thing, or all the other – will be the ultimate question.  For the first time in my adult life, thanks in no small measure to Trump, both sides now fully understand each other’s intentions.  Believe it or not, that is one of the more hopeful signs of a truly promising future for this great country and its people, as America remakes itself,  over and over again.