It has been almost 48 hours since all of the major news organizations called the presidential election in favor of Joseph R. Biden, Jr., yet President Donald J. Trump has refused to concede the election to his opponent, the President-elect. Some Republican leaders, such as former President George W. Bush and Senator Mitt Romney, have broken with Mr. Trump and offered their congratulations to Mr. Biden. But a shocking number of Republicans have supported the President in his absurd refusal to concede.
Two basic forms of myth are circulating among Trump voters by way of "rationalizing" the President's behavior. The first is an appeal to conspiracy theory. By this understanding, the Democrats nefariously engineered a fraud in the vote count to induce a Biden victory. Purveyors of this idea point to the fact that Trump was "winning" on election night, and only began to slip in the polls as new Biden votes were "found."
This, of course, is a fallacy. No votes were found. Rather, due to fears of the still-raging Covid-19 pandemic, millions of votes had been legally mailed in prior to election day, and had been left uncounted, in many states because Republican legislatures had explicitly forbidden the processing of mail-in ballots before election day itself. This last maneuver was itself a desperate and transparently malicious gambit to produce an appearance of impropriety. If the Pennsylvania legislature, for example, had made contingency plans for the pre-processing of an unprecedented flood of mail-in ballots, we would have known on the night of Tuesday November 3 that Biden had won the presidency.
But conspiracy theories are made even more ludicrous by any cursory glance at the facts. If Democrats were capable of such skullduggery, why would they have failed to engineer a Trump defeat in 2016, when they controlled the presidency? Why would they have lost so many House seats in this election, and stand so little chance of taking control of the Senate? It just does not make sense.
The other form of myth circulating about Donald Trump's behavior is that, because this was such a "close" election, we should wait patiently for the President to work through his pantomime of court challenges and recounts, and "let the process play out." This is a transparent sham. There is no process, and there is no need for patience. It is Donald Trump's patriotic duty to concede the election now.
Again, this is made clear by any honest assessment of the facts. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency by a margin of 77,000 thousand votes distributed across three states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania- at the national level he lost the popular vote by 2.9 million ballots). Because the race was so close, Hillary Clinton waited until the morning after Election Day, Wednesday November 9, to make a formal concession speech. At the point that she conceded, none of the states had officially certified the results of the election. She conceded because it was her duty as an American to concede as soon as the outcome of the race was clear.
Why is this so? It is for two reasons: one of principle, the other of pragmatism. In principle, it is vitally important that all participants in our democratic politics foster trust and confidence in our electoral system. Without that faith, democracy will collapse. In practical terms, the constitutionally mandated interval of the presidential transition is brutally short. An incoming administration has just over ten weeks to build an entire branch of government from the ground up, and requires the assistance of the outgoing administration to do so. It is thus vital that that process begin as soon as possible.
Thus it was absolutely right for Hillary Clinton to concede in 2016, and anyone who acknowledges that fact must admit that it is even more right for Donald Trump to concede right now. Joseph R. Biden's defeat of Donald Trump in 2020 was much more decisive than Trump's defeat of Clinton in 2016. In the three states that gave Trump the victory in 2016 (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), Biden currently leads by 200,000 votes (more than twice Trump's 77,00-vote margin of victory in 2016), and that lead will continue to widen as vote counting goes on. Beyond that, Biden currently leads by about 60,000 votes distributed across the states of Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. There can be no doubt that the people have spoken and that Biden won this election handily in both the popular vote (by a margin of more than 5,000,000 votes, when all is said and done) and the Electoral College (where news organizations currently give Biden between 279 and 290 electoral votes, where a winning majority is 270, and where Biden may ultimately garner as many as 306 votes if he wins in both Georgia and Arizona).
No combination of court cases and recounts will change the outcome of the presidential election. The election of 2020 as it stands right now is much more of a fait acommpli than the 2016 race was at the point that Hillary Clinton graciously and courageously conceded in that election. Donald Trump's refusal to concede is manifestly petulant, venal, and childish, but it is something even worse. It is unpatriotic. He must concede the election now, and anyone who truly loves this country should join in the call for him to do so.
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