It was one year ago Wednesday that the “crime of the century” occurred, according to former president Donald Trump: The 2020 presidential election was stolen by Joe Biden and Democrats. And yet the anniversary of that contest dawned with that ridiculous assertion newly undermined — to the extent that something with literally no foundation can be undermined further.
2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis ArrowRight
The theory as postulated by Trump and his allies goes something like this. Some group linked to the political left conducted a campaign to systematically submit votes on behalf of dead voters or people who hadn’t chosen to cast a ballot. Others used electronic voting machines to alter vote totals. This occurred not just across multiple states but within county-level voting systems that are all run independently. It occurred in such a way that Biden earned just enough votes in just enough places to carry the electoral college, suggesting both coordination and a sophisticated ability to track election results that seem to conflict with how we generally understand elections to be run.
This rampant effort left all sorts of statistical fingerprints according to Trump’s allies, markers that emerge only following complicated calculations about vote totals and turnout, in the way that you might finally figure out the reason why it makes sense to have a cookie for dessert despite your diet. Despite this rampant theoretical evidence that something iffy happened, there has been no direct evidence of fraudulent efforts uncovered, no person who’s come forward to admit their involvement in a scheme that would require at least hundreds of participants and no physical evidence demonstrating how this effort was supposed to have worked. There have been alleged systemic efforts to commit fraud uncovered in recent years, including in North Carolina and New Jersey, but somehow here, despite the scale, attention and significance, no participant has been unmasked and no one has stepped forward to claim the reward of a surfeit of praise and attention from right-wing media for admitting their part in the scheme.
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One of the particularly hard-to-reconcile things about Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him a year ago was that somehow Republicans who weren’t Donald Trump managed to eke out unexpected victories. House Republicans overperformed, as did Republicans in Senate races that were expected to be close. Yet somehow the Democrats only decided to target Trump. Some hand-waving was required here, often centered on either the idea that the fraudsters themselves were incompetent or rushed or perhaps that this was somehow a classic double-cross. You know, that’s exactly what they wanted you to think! — except without it being clear who the “they” are or what the “that” was.
For 12 months now, those of us with at least one foot in the real world have pointed out that this all collapses under even the most basic scrutiny. Doesn’t it make more sense that Democrats were heavily motivated to vote Trump out of office and that Republicans were generally a bit more enthusiastic about non-Trump candidates than Trump himself? Doesn’t it make more sense to assume, given the absence of any evidence of rampant fraud, that there is no evidence because there was no rampant fraud? To assume that maybe Democrats don’t have a flawless national vote-stealing operation that they leveraged to barely win the House and Senate in 2020?
Any idea that Democrats could flip on the fraud machine to steal elections at will was, at best, on life support on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday morning, it had passed on to Conspiracy Theory Heaven, the notice in the newspaper asking that people contribute to Trump’s super PAC in lieu of flowers. After all, if the Democrats could steal elections particularly in places that they control, why did they lose the Virginia gubernatorial race and only barely manage to hold New Jersey (assuming they do)? Did the all-powerful invisible fraud machine suddenly falter?
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Again, there’s a simpler explanation. After taking the White House, Democrats became responsible for the direction of the country. President Biden’s dire approval numbers and his party’s failure to pass legislation, coupled with factors like high gas prices and the elevation of education issues (thanks in part to a campaign in right-wing media) created a very difficult environment even in heavily blue states. The issue wasn’t that the fraud machine broke. It was that Republicans could win even in blue states with candidates who weren’t Trump in environments that were centered on Democratic problems and not Republican ones.
But these are the sorts of races that, in theory, rampant fraud operations would be expected to resolve. If Democrats could inject a bunch of votes to give the Democrat a narrow win one year ago, why couldn’t they one day ago?
Well, the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit has an answer: it was a classic double-cross.
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“[W]here were the magical votes this year?” the site’s Jim Hoft frothed. “Was this omission on purpose? Was this part of a larger psyop on the American public? Was this part of their game? Throw in McAuliffe as a sacrificial lamb knowing they can steal any future election at will?”
This followed a breathless explanation of how Biden benefited from fraudulent votes last year, something that Hoft insisted “have yet to be explained.” It has been explained, of course; there was no rampant or significant fraud. It’s just that Hoft and the like are uninterested in reality when surreality is so much more interesting and lucrative.
Conservative writer Erick Erickson, a denizen of the real world, has for months anguished at Republican insistences that fraud occurred. After the Virginia result was clear, he offered some thoughts to others in his party.
“Shut up about stolen elections that weren’t stolen,” he wrote on Facebook, “because I assure you the Democrats would have stolen some of the 2021 elections if they could have, but they could not so they did not.”
Ah, so Erick Erickson is part of the psyop, too! Good to know.