Dakota Beacon

As the dust settles on the 2020 election, random thoughts gel. Here are a few of those thoughts.

Shenanigans in the post-election vote counting breed cynicism. Some of the antics during vote counting appear awfully suspicious. America has placed its election integrity in question. If “Dancing with the Stars” can count 130 million votes in 5 minutes, surely our several states can tally the vote in 24 hours – if they don’t take time to manufacture fraud. Democrats and Never-Trumpers worked hard for 3 ½ years to overthrow President Trump. Why should they halt the effort during the vote count? The biggest fraud, the phony Russian collusion scam, didn’t work. As treasonous as it was, no one was charged, much less sent to prison. No one gets caught or pays a price. So, why hold states’ election officials accountable?

There are reasons to believe something in America has gone terribly wrong. Many of the polls and pontificators predicted that Trump would lose in a landslide. But he didn’t. Pollsters served as political operatives breeding support for one side and demoralizing the other. Many Americans now see them as rank propagandists.

Democrats become the party of the ultra-rich, warring against the middle class and writing them off as bitter-clingers, deplorables, and chumps. The liberal mega-rich now warn politicians they will bury any populist conservatives with their oppositional cash. Opponents of the Ruling Class would be wise to keep a low profile lest they be defeated and bankrupted.

Silicon Valley moguls, like the 19th-century oil, rail, and sugar barons, saw no reason to hide their partisanship and clout. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was unremorseful at his hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee. He made no apologies that his company practiced the censoring and de-platforming of conservative users behaving very much like 19th-century oil and railroad magnates. Likewise for Google’s Sundar Pichai. It’s known that Google manipulated their search engine results to enforce progressive thinking. Social-media platforms relying on Google shut down accounts and censored ads and messages in the last three weeks of the campaign giving an unfair advantage to Biden. It has been said that Americans are sleepwalking through the encroachment of “soft totalitarianism.”

Do not discount this scenario. While Vice President Biden ran a non-campaign from his basement, his surrogates were in the proverbial back room engineering what appears to be an illicit path for a Biden victory. Sour grapes? No way!

Ponder some oddities in down ballot races. Votes for Trump in just a few key states, states crucial to Trump’s victory, displayed “voting irregularities” and pauses in vote counting. This as Trump appeared to lead in final vote totals.

Isn’t it weird if Republicans win more seats in the House, hold the Senate, and add to state legislative seats across the nation that voters then choose Biden over Trump? Trump enjoys massive support among Republican voters and holds a much higher approval rating from them than he did in 2016. He expanded his alliance to include far more working-class voters. Beyond that, more Black and Hispanic voters supported Trump than in any presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1968.

This is not a Blue Wave Year. Yet we are supposed to believe the same Democrat-media-Big Tech complex that fed us highly inaccurate poll numbers all year, which promoted the Russia hoax, promulgated bad information about coronavirus, and colluded to sink Trump’s presidency at every turn, did not at all affect the top of the ticket? Coincidence? What are the chances? Look at the down ballot races and the incongruent results in just a few key states that everyone knew would be critical.

Republicans had twice as many Senate seats to defend as did the Democrats. They currently appear to have retained their Senate majority. Poorly-funded Republicans kept seats Democrats spent hundreds of millions of dollars to flip. Susan Collins (ME), Mitch McConnell (KY), and Lindsey Graham (SC) were beneficiaries. Democrats would have us believe the same voters rejected Trump.

Republicans flipped seven seats in the U.S. House and Democrats flipped only two. That reduces the Democrats’ hold on the House from 232 to 227, only nine more than the required 218 majority. With vote tallies still incomplete, Republicans could possibly flip as many as 15 seats. The only gubernatorial flip went from Democrat to Republican in Montana. Democrats targeted several state legislatures but failed to flip them. These include Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Texas, considered one of the biggest flip opportunities, also stayed red ahead of reapportionment next year.

Trump has filed for a recount in Wisconsin amid Biden’s razor-thin lead. Conservatives filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania state secretary alleging that a last-minute rule change to the state's ballot-counting process potentially slanting the outcome of the election. Trump's team also filed a lawsuit in Georgia, where a GOP poll observer witnessed late absentee ballots illegally added to a stack of on-time absentee ballots. Other legal action are initiated. Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation, said that Republicans have generally been more successful than Democrats at challenging election balloting and counting procedures.

Assuming Trump fights and loses, what then? The opposition of all stripes want him gone. They fear him. They would much prefer as president a senile old Democrat easily manipulated by the radical left and the Chinese Communists. With political strategic adjustments they could rule forever.

The ruling elite may have overlooked the wildcard in all of this. They never accurately assessed Trump and his connection to the middle class. So, what is the wildcard?

Assuming Trump loses, what if he ran in 2024? As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).