...stories like this purporting to offer evidence-free explanations for Biden's victory are a staple of our media, and no one seems remotely embarrassed about running them. Why did Biden win? Here are some possible explanations: (1) hatred of Trump sent people to the polls to vote against him; they would have voted for anyone other than Trump; (2) anger about the pandemic and the economy sent people to the polls to vote against him; they would have voted for any challenger; (3) Republicans and Democrats showed up, voted for their party's candidate, and then the "independent" voters (i.e., those who can't tell the differnce between night and day) showed up and voted on instinct or whim, and it broke for Biden, just barely.
Those three scenarios are at least as plausible (indeed, I'd venture more plausible) than the fictional NYT narrative according to which Biden won because he "campaigned as a sober and conventional presence, concerned about the 'soul of the country.' He correctly judged the character of the country."
And "just barely" is really the moral of this election. Trump "just barely" won in 2016, and Biden "just barely" won this time. (I guess that means America is "just barely" "sober and conventional" in its outlook!) Look at the margins of victory in the key states: 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, 40,000 in Pennsylvania, 19,000 in Arizona, 28,000 in Nevada, 145,000 in Michigan. Except for Michigan, these are vanishingly small margins, la few tenths of a percentage point, except in Michigan--which wasn't an impressive win when one recalls that Obama beat McCain by over 800,000 votes there in 2008. Will Kamala Harris be able to pull off these close wins in 2024? I wish I could be optimistic.
And even in the states that go Democratic by landslide margins, the results do not bear out the NYT's nonsense explanation. California went for Biden with 64.6% of the vote, to 33.4% for Trump. But in 2016, California went for Clinton with 61.7% of the vote, to 31.6% for Trump, essentially the same margin of victory (with Trump actually increasing his share of the vote in California since 2016!).
Something else is going on, and it's not good. What if the Republicans ran a competent and less psychologically unbalanced populist demagogue? Does anyone think the "sober and conventional presence," "soul of America" vote will prevail?
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