Time for a reckoning on the 2020 election

Last spring and summer I watched bits of our contemporary gladiatorial contests, AKA congressional confirmation hearings. One thrust that many Democrat inquisitors relied on to soften up their victims was some form of the question: “Do you believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?”

At least one contestant resorted to the parry “I believe that Joe Biden was seated as president,” which of course is not quite the same thing as acknowledging that he actually won. The subterfuge did not pass by unnoticed. Nothing escapes these Democrat Divas of the Dialectic. Having exposed the equivocation, they attempted to pounce. “Aha! So you are an election denier! Now let’s talk about the attempted insurrection of January 6.”

I do not believe that, regarded as political theater, these exhibitions were crowd-pleasers. The main reason is that, despite the round-the-clock emergency support from the in-the-tank media, the public continued to have doubts about the 2020 election – just as, truth be told, it had begun to turn against the prevailing narrative regarding January 6.

The problem with the Potemkin village erected around the 2020 election can be encapsulated in one simple word: numbers.

In 2020, Joe Biden received – or was it only “received”? – 81.3 million votes. Donald Trump got 74.2 million. A commanding win for Mr. Senility, right? That translates to a popular-vote victory of 51.3 percent to 46.8 percent. True, Trump won 2,588 counties to Biden’s 551. That is why those post-election maps are filled with red, flecked here and there by little pustules of blue. But the cold light of day shone down from the number 306, which was the number of electoral votes accorded to Scranton Joe. Trump managed a paltry 232. End of story?

Not quite. Here is where the word “anomaly” enters. Many commentators have noted that the 2020 election is hedged with anomalies. In 2016 Donald Trump received 63 million votes and 304 electoral votes. A look at history would suggest that he would receive fewer votes in 2020. But that is not what happened. In fact, he received 11 million more in 2020 than in 2016. Anomaly number one.

In 2008 the super-smooth historic cleans-up-well rocket man Barack Obama got 69.4 million votes, crushing John McCain. (In 2012, Obama snagged just shy of 66 million.) In 2020 sleepy Joe Biden, campaigning from his basement, seems to have blown by Obama’s historic victory. Biden, remember, clocked in at 81.3 million votes. Turnout in that election was an astonishing 66.6 percent, a number that dwarfed Obama’s 61.6 in 2008. Amazing. Astonishing. Or anomaly number two?

It was such numbers that led some observers to speak not of “turnout” but rather of “turn-in” in the 2020 election. All those mail-in ballots. All those drop boxes. There were plenty of recounts following the 2020 election. But how many audits were there? It is one thing to count the number of pebbles in a box two or three separate times. It is something else to find out how the pebbles got there in the first place.

We haven’t done that. And, as the canny former prosecutor who writes on Substack under the soubriquet “Shipwreckedcrew” observed in a newsletter on October 26, it may well be “impossible to know with any certainty… whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump received more validly cast and counted ballots in the 2020 election.”

And that fact, the fact that we just do not know what happened in the 2020 election, means that lurking just behind the word “anomaly” is the word “fraud.” As Shipwreckedcrew notes, because every state has its own procedures for administering presidential elections and for dealing with challenges to the results, “there is no uniform standard for what is to happen if outcome-determinative fraud is discovered.” Moreover, “we do not have a solution for the problem of fraud that changes the outcome of a presidential election.”

Trump is determined to find that solution. On October 26 he returned to one of his old standbys: that the 2020 election was “rigged and stolen.” “We now know everything,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much ‘gusto’ as [befits] the biggest SCANDAL in American history!” Is this just sour grapes: the tired, repetitive motions of a sore loser? I do not think so. On the contrary, I think Shipwreckedcrew is right:

If any President has unanswered questions about possible election fraud at the state level during the time period between election day and the inauguration, to do nothing is to abdicate the responsibility to the voters who cast their ballots for the ostensible losing candidate if there is evidence that the candidate they voted for might actually have won. Those voters would have had their civil rights violated if subjected to the leadership of a president who did not receive the necessary number of votes to hold that office.

Covid, January 6, the snarling distemper of the anti-Trump media made it essentially impossible for Trump to investigate the 2020 election before he left office on January 20, 2021. Now he is back in office, wielding the reins of executive power. The Hillary Clinton retort – “What difference, at this point, does it make?” – will not wash. Shipwreckedcrew rightly argues that “the 47th President of the United States, now that he has the tools, has an obligation to examine the 2020 election with the Department of Justice if he concludes that the 46th President failed to do so out of the 46th President’s self-interest to not have his victory called into question.” Trump has so concluded. Buckle up.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.