This morning, my parents awoke to find that their Joe Biden sign and other Democratic signs on their lawn had been stolen. My dad, a 79-year-old retired journalist who used to be a staunch conservative and worked in the Reagan administration, has been voting for the Democrats the last few election cycles — and he is absolutely disgusted with the corruption, incompetence, dishonesty, and authoritarian tendencies of Donald Trump. Although technically he is still registered as a Republican, I doubt if he will ever vote for another Republican politician again.
My parents fortunately were able to get a new Biden sign from a friendly Democratic neighbor, who had an extra one to spare, and they have already put it up on their middle-class suburban lawn. Biden signs outnumber Trump signs in their neighborhood by 10 or 20 to one. As recently as 10 or 15 years ago, neighborhoods like theirs were highly competitive or even leaned Republican. The transformation of the Republican Party into the party of wild-eyed conspiracy theories, opposition to science, and the worship of a political false messiah who lies and boasts so brazenly while governing so poorly that he would make even the devil blush at his tremendous chutzpah, has caused the rise of a new Democratic majority in the American electorate.
All across America, suburbs are going blue, even in red states like the newly competitive Texas. You can’t win national elections if you lose both the cities and the suburbs — which is why Republicans are getting desperate. It’s why they’re stealing Democratic yard signs, and it’s why they stole another seat on the Supreme Court by ramming through a rushed vote on Amy Coney Barrett in the midst of an election, and it’s why the court just ruled that any ballot that arrives after November 3 in the swing state of Wisconsin — even if it was postmarked by election day — will not be counted.
If the 2020 election were going to be a nail-biter like in 2016, then the Supreme Court’s anti-democratic ruling would be a cause for serious concern. It could even lead to civil unrest, and maybe set the United States on the course to dissolution, if Trump were to lose the popular vote by let’s say 5% but win the electoral college again because of a narrow “victory” in a state like Wisconsin, due only to the decision of SCOTUS to throw out ballots that Trump’s deliberately slowed-down postal service causes to arrive after election day.
But I’m not worried, and here’s why: Because all across America, lots of people like my dad are voting for Joe Biden — white, well-educated senior citizens in suburbia, who in the past voted Republican. They don’t want four more years of a pompous madman running our country. They want a boring, competent politician who will just get the job done.
I expect Biden to win the popular vote by at least 8%, with a strong electoral college majority to go with it. I also expect Trump to declare victory anyway, and ludicrously claim something like this:
There was fraud in this election like you’ve never seen before, tremendous fraud like you can’t even imagine. To be honest, it was the most corrupt and fraudulent election in American history, and it’s not even a question that we won, big-league, when you take out all the fraud, and you’re gonna see that real soon. You’ve got millions and millions of ballots coming through the mail — tens of millions of ballots — and it’s dead people voting, people voting dozens of times, all of them for the radical socialist Democrats, Sleepy Joe Biden and KaMAHla Harris, who are the worst candidates who have ever run in the history of this country. And let me tell you — it’s all being orchestrated by China. The communist party of China has attacked our great country in this election, just like they did with the China virus. Millions and millions of fake votes for Sleepy Joe and KaMAHla, and it’s all coming from China. But when you take out all the fraud in this election, it’s been a great victory for us, really a tremendous victory, when you count only the votes of real Americans who voted in this election and you take out all the fraud. So it’s been an incredible victory and we’re going to have four more years and we’re going to keep making America great again!
Trump may try to set the wheels in motion for overturning the results of the election through Republican state legislatures or through the courts, but I believe his loss will be so overwhelming that no such scheme can work.
And so, although Trump will never admit he lost, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the next president of the United States. Perhaps Trump will spend the next four years starting an extreme right-wing TV channel and running for president again in 2024 as his next grifting venture — complete with a fake Oval Office replica as a set, where he can pretend in front of the cameras that he’s the true president, like a martyr who was fraudulently expelled from the White House until someday he shall return in glorious vengeance. After all, he has to make money somehow, to try to pay off his hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes and debts. Trump’s dead-end followers, perhaps 35% of the American people, will likely sink even deeper into a cult-like mentality of endless grievance and rage, fueled by Trump TV and QAnon conspiracy theories, and our country will have to deal with this for years to come.
But as for the majority of Americans, we will be controlling the U.S. government. The signs are looking good for the Democrats to win total control of Congress and the Presidency. And that’s because the average American has had enough of the foolishness and nastiness of Trumpism. The average American believes in democracy, not fascism — counting votes, not throwing them away or threatening violence to hold onto power.
This time, the Republicans have gone too far. Next Tuesday night, it’ll be party time for Team Blue!
