Goodbye Don, Hello Joe

Greg Maresca analyzed the results of last month’s presidential election. “From 1980 through 2016, 19 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties voted for the presidential winner in every election,” he wrote. “In 2020, only one of them backed Joe Biden. Is this a statistical anomaly, or is something seriously amiss?’

The answer is, it’s neither. Did Trump win one of the counties in 2016 by just a few votes? If so, it’s possible it took only a few votes in that county to give Biden his win. Obviously, a lot of counties switched from red to blue. Besides, Maresca’s 19 counties are less than six tenths of one percent of the more than 3,000 counties; I’m certain one could find 19 other counties as evidence of an election theory different from Maresca’s conspiracy theory.

In research recently published in the Journal of Individual Differences, people who believe conspiracy theories ”tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place. They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist.”

The conspiracy theory “Stop the Steal” was supposed to reveal how Trump’s enemies /a/k/a Democrats manipulated the election process to prevent his reelection. No actual evidence of this has been found. The claims of fraud became more and more ridiculous, the better lawyers resigned, and federal and state judges, whether appointed by Democrats or Republicans, including Trump, refused to go along. “Stop the Steal” is less about flipping the election than about fueling a fundraising effort for Trump’s coffers and soothing his battered ego.

But of course, facts don’t matter to Trump, his enablers, or his “base.” Much has been written about the growing disregard for facts, data, and analysis in political and civil discourse in the U.S. and around the world. For example, the RAND Corporation released a report, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life. The authors wrote, “Increasingly, it seems that important policy debates, both within the federal government and across the electorate, are as likely to hinge on opinion or anecdote as they are on objective facts or rigorous analysis. However, policy decisions made primarily on the basis of opinion or anecdote can have deleterious effects on American democracy and might impose significant costs on the public.”

The fact is, Joe Biden beat Trump by six million popular votes, and won 306 electoral votes. When he received 306 electoral votes in 2016, Trump said,” We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College.” “Blowout. Historic,” wrote Kellyanne Conway. Actually not. In 2012, Barack Obama won with 365 electoral votes, and reelection with 332 electoral votes.

It’s time to move on.

We celebrated Thanksgiving last week because of the Civil War and what happened in Gettysburg. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in one of her Letters from an American, wrote that after two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning – battered but winning. At Gettysburg July 1, 2, and 3, Union troops sent the Confederates army back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg finally fell to Ulysses S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning. President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of thanksgiving. Clergy across the country noted the victories of the Union army and navy in the past year, and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain, as Lincoln himself insisted just three months later in his Gettysburg Address. In October 1863, President Lincoln declared the second national day of thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed. Lincoln established our national Thanksgiving to celebrate the survival of our democratic government.

More than 150 years later, President-Elect Joe Biden addressed Americans, noting that we are in our own war, against the novel coronavirus. Like Lincoln, he urged us to persevere, promising that vaccines are on their way. “There is real hope, tangible hope. So hang on,” he said. “Don’t let yourself surrender to the fatigue…. [W]e can and we will beat this virus. America is not going to lose this war. You will get your lives back. Life is going to return to normal. This will not last forever.

“Think of what we’ve come through, centuries of human enslavement; a cataclysmic Civil War; the exclusion of women from the ballot box; World Wars; Jim Crow; a long twilight struggle against Soviet tyranny that could have ended not with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in nuclear Armageddon…It’s been in the most difficult of circumstances that the soul of our nation has been forged. Faith, courage, sacrifice, service to country, service to each other, and gratitude even in the face of suffering, have long been part of what Thanksgiving means in America.”

Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.