In all the excitement among objective journalists for Joe
Biden’s declared victory, reporters are missing how extraordinary the
Democrat’s performance was in the 2020 election. It’s not just that the former
vice president is on track to become the oldest
president in American history, it’s what he managed to accomplish at
the polls this year.
Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in
2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than
Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to
secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the
country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu
until now.
While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in
every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the
metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more
surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’
general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.
He accomplished all this after receiving a record low share
of the primary vote compared to his Republican opponent heading into the
general election. Clearly, these are tremendous and unexpected achievements
that would normally receive sophisticated analysis from the journalist class
but have somehow gone mostly unmentioned during the celebrations at news
studios in New York City and Washington, D.C.
The massive national political realignment now taking place
may be one source of these surprising upsets. Yet still, to have pulled so many
rabbits out of his hat like this, nobody can deny that Biden is a first-rate
campaigner and politician, the likes of which America has never before seen.
Let’s break down just how unique his political voodoo has been in 2020.
1. 80 Million Votes
Holy moly! A lot of Americans
turned out for a Washington politician who’s been in office for nearly 50
years. Consider this: no incumbent president in nearly a century and a half has
gained votes in a re-election campaign and still lost.
President Trump gained more than ten million votes since his
2016 victory, but Biden’s appeal was so substantial that it overcame President
Trump’s record
support among minority voters. Biden also shattered Barack Obama’s own
popular vote totals, really calling into question whether it was not perhaps
Biden who pulled Obama across the finish lines in 2008 and 2012.
Proving how sharp his political instincts are, the former VP
managed to gather a record
number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in
measures of voter
enthusiasm. Biden was so savvy that he motivated voters unenthusiastic
about his campaign to vote for him in record numbers.
2. Winning Despite Losing Most
Bellwether Counties
Biden is set to become the first
president in 60 years to lose the states of Ohio and Florida on his
way to election. For a century, these states have consistently predicted the
national outcome, and they have been considered roughly representative of the
American melting pot as a whole. Despite national polling giving Biden a lead
in both states, he lost Ohio by eight points and
Florida by more than three.
For Biden to lose these key bellwethers by notable margins
and still win the national election is newsworthy. Not since the Mafia
allegedly aided
John F. Kennedy in winning Illinois over Richard Nixon in 1960 has an
American president pulled off this neat trick.
Even more unbelievably, Biden is on his way to winning the
White House after having lost almost every historic bellwether county across
the country. The
Wall Street Journal and The
Epoch Times independently analyzed the results 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. Bellwether
counties overwhelmingly chose President Trump, but Biden found a path
to victory anyway.
3. Biden Trailed Clinton Except
in a Select Few Cities
Patrick
Basham, a pollster with an accurate track record and the director of the
Democracy Institute in D.C., highlighted two observations made by fellow
colleagues, polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll and Washington Post
election analyst Robert Barnes. Baris 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.”
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.
If Democrats succeed in eliminating the Electoral College,
Biden’s magic formula for churning out overwhelming vote totals in a handful of
cities should make the Democrats unbeatable.
4. Biden Won Despite Democrat
Losses Everywhere Else
Randy
DeSoto noted in The Western Journal that “Donald Trump was pretty much
the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his
own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.” Now that’s a Biden
miracle!
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.
“It’s clear that
Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy.”
Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now
that’s historic!
5. Biden Overcame Trump’s Commanding Primary Vote
In the past, primary vote totals have been remarkably
accurate in predicting general election winners. Political analyst David
Chapman highlighted three historical facts before the election.
First,
no incumbent who has received 75 percent of the total primary vote has lost
re-election. Second,
President Trump received 94 percent of the primary vote, which is the fourth
highest of all time (higher than Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, or Obama).
In fact, Trump is only one of five incumbents since 1912 to receive more than
90 percent of the primary vote.
Third,
Trump set a record for most primary votes received by an incumbent when more
than 18 million people turned out for him in 2020 (the previous record, held by
Bill Clinton, was half that number). For Biden to prevail in the general
election, despite Trump’s historic support in the primaries, turns a century’s
worth of prior election data on its head.
Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that
many more journalists aren’t pointing that out.