The 2020 Presidential election shared a problem with the 1998 MLB home run race: the winning candidate did too well. In 1998, steroid juicer Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’s home run record by nine home runs or roughly 15 percent.
In 2020, Joe Biden’s 81 million votes broke Barack Obama’s 2008 record 69 million votes by 12 million votes or roughly 17 percent. Obama’s 2008 numbers were anomalous. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers were closer to the norm, and Biden got nearly 25 percent more votes than she did, a cool 16 million additional votes when finally counted.
Campaigning from his basement, this cognitively-challenged, charisma-free codger did much too well in 2020, and now even the Left is noticing. With virtually all the 2024 presidential election votes counted, Kamala Harris’s vote total remains roughly seven million votes shy of Biden’s ballot box-busting performance in 2020.
In trying to explain the differential, Michael Bender of the New York Times hinted at the truth. Wrote Bender, “[S]ome backsliding could be expected after the record turnout in 2020, which was aided by pandemic rule changes that increased mail voting.” You think?
As should be expected, Bender chose not to pursue this line of thinking to its natural end. If he had, he might have asked why only the Democrats seemed to have been aided in 2020 “by pandemic rule changes.” President-elect Donald Trump did not “backslide” in 2024. He upped his 2020 vote total by about two million.
In 2024, with life back to something like normal, Harris was denied the performance-enhancing juice that propelled Biden in 2020. That juice was formidable. The convenient arrival of COVID gave the Democrats a rationale for dismantling the safeguards against voter fraud in state after state.
Some 39 states changed their election laws prior to the 2020 election. That was unprecedented. What was unconstitutional was that many of them did so without legislative approval. In several states, the courts, electoral officials, and health honchos exploited the media-driven COVID panic to assume this right for themselves. The Republicans responded with lawsuits, but the courts could not or would not respond in a timely fashion.
The mail-in process, much of it improvised, was subject to considerable mischief. In 2005, co-chair of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, former president Jimmy Carter made this very clear, “Fraud occurs in several ways,” Carter and his colleagues concluded. “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of voter fraud.”
These problems were not theoretical. The commission cited case after case in which these practices had occurred and even affected outcomes.
Blank ballots got intercepted. Citizens at group sites like nursing homes were intimidated. Vote buying schemes escaped detection. Early ballots went unsecured. “Third party” registration drives enlisted noncitizens and other ineligible people.
New York Times, Adam Liptak affirmed the liberal case against mail-in ballots. “Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted,” he argued, “more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.” In addition to innocent errors, fraud was “vastly more prevalent” in mail-in voting than voting in person.
In 2020, past concerns were shoved down the memory hole. Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway marveled at the shift in party line along the length of the leftist front. “At the drop of a hat,” Hemingway wrote in her excellent book, Rigged, “America’s electoral system went from irredeemably corrupt and broken in 2016 to unquestionably safe in 2020.”
Hewing to the new party line, the media chose not to notice that the postal unions were totally in the tank for Joe Biden. The unions weren’t even subtle about it. Just months before the election, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) told its 300,000 members that Donald Trump threatened “the very survival of USPS.”
While praising Biden as a “fierce ally and defender,” the NALC claimed a Trump victory meant “the revocation of collective bargaining rights by America’s postal unions, massive cuts to services, and the potential privatization of the agency.” The NALC was the less radical of the two unions. The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) also endorsed Biden. Biden repaid the unions for their successful delivery of some 60 million ballots — and their silencing of whistleblowers — with a (very quiet) exemption from the vaccine mandate for their workers.
Moving in lockstep as was their norm, the Democrats and their media allies quickly settled on a smear to describe any protest against the election’s legitimacy. “Among the thousands of falsehoods Trump has uttered during his presidency,” claimed Melissa Block of NPR, “this one in particular has earned the distinction of being called the ‘big lie.’” In fact, this label wasn’t “earned.” It was bestowed.
The gaslighting was epidemic. As one example out of the many, the once-reputable Brennan Center for Justice declared the 2020 election “one of the most secure elections in our history.” To suggest otherwise was to be an “election denier,” the “denier,” of course, being a word first applied to Holocaust revisionists.
What helped make the election secure, claimed the Brennan Center, was that “the votes were counted in a timely manner.” Abraham Lincoln knew the election results before he went to bed on election night 1860. One hundred and sixty years later, votes were still being counted (and manufactured) weeks after the election. Lest the public catch on, the major social media companies conspired with the authorities to keep the “deniers” — and their evidence — off their platforms.
America’s sports media have had less tolerance for those who boosted their numbers artificially than have the political media. Mark McGwire remained on the MLB Hall of Fame ballot for the full ten years of his eligibility, but he never got more than 24 percent of the sportswriters’ vote, well shy of the 75 percent needed for election.
Like Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, and other juicers, McGwire lives his life under a shadow. He and they have all had their reputations trashed, their honors stripped, their records forever tainted by asterisks. In these athletes’ defense, no one has gone to jail for exposing their fraud. As the hundreds still in prison for their protest on January 6 can attest, the same cannot be said for Joe Biden. An asterisk will not be justice enough.
Jack Cashill’s newest book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available in all formats.
Image: Chris Phan (Clipdude)
