Honestly, It Really Wasn't That Close

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

For months, we heard regime media and many of the pollsters tell us how razor-thin this election was going to turn out to be. The final Real Clear Politics average of national polls between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris showed the Vice-President was ahead by one-tenth of one percent. As of the writing of this column, with votes still coming in from different pockets of the country, Donald Trump has won the popular vote by somewhere around 3.5%. The election really wasn't that close. 

All of the Battleground averages, many of them herded by pollsters and mocked by Nate Silver for so doing, tried to tell us that every swing state - Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, were all within a point one way or the other. Here's what actually took place. 

In Arizona, with 60% of the vote in, and lots of GOP areas left to report, Trump is ahead by 2.8%. In Nevada, with 90% in, Trump leads by 4.7%. In Georgia, Trump won by 2.2%. In North Carolina, by a margin of 3.4%, Trump won. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 2.5%. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 3.6%. And in Michigan, with 95% in, Trump is up by 1.8%. The common denominator in every swing state? Donald Trump is at or above 50%. They are decisive victories. It wasn't close. 

2020 was close. Arizona was decided for Joe Biden by 10,500 votes. Georgia was decided for Biden by 11,700 votes. And Wisconsin was decided by 20,700. Even Pennsylvania was only a margin of 80,000. Compare that to this cycle. Arizona and Nevada, thus far, have at least 50,000-vote spreads. Georgia's spread is 120,000. Pennsylvania is around 170,000. North Carolina has a Trump edge by 192,000. Wisconsin's spread is 126,000, and so far, Michigan's margin is about 60,000. It's really not that close. 

Conventional wisdom was that the Republicans, because of the number of seats Democrats had to defend in the Senate, would easily retake the upper chamber with 51 seats. Right now, Bernie Moreno in Ohio won handily over Sherrod Brown to become the 51st vote for the GOP. Jim Justice in West Virginia won in a rout. Tim Sheehy is going to be the 52nd Republican senator from Montana. With over 95% in, Mike Rogers in Michigan is up by 14,000 votes. He'd be 53. And in Pennsylvania, also with over 95% in, Dave McCormick is up by 67,000 over invisible Bob Casey. That would make 54. Sam Brown is holding on in Nevada by his fingernails, and Kari Lake is in striking distance in Arizona, and Eric Hovde is within a handful of votes in Wisconsin. When all is counted, it could be a GOP +5, 6, or maybe even a 7 seat gain. That's a very good night. 

The House, as of this writing, has a modest gain thus far, with a bunch of West Coast swing states still in play. If everything else were static, they'd gain a net three seats, giving Mike Johnson and House leadership a little bit of breathing room. It could easily add between 2 and 4 more seats above that. So why was it not the closest election ever? 

Polling has not corrected for the electoral black swan of our age, Donald Trump. They simply do not know how to reach male heartland Trump voters, and are literally sticking their wet fingers in the wind to try to see which way the wind is blowing. As Nate Cohn of the New York Times admitted last week in their final NYT/Siena poll, we might be off by as much as we were in 2020. They guessed Trump +1 in their final full field poll. They were off by almost 2. And the NYT/Siena poll turned out to be better than most. Many still showed Harris up by as much as 3 going into the final weekend. 

Trump earned huge gains with Blacks, with Latinos, and with Jewish Americans. The telling stat of the night for me was this detail out of the three states that actually cooperated all the way through Election Day, being transparent with how many votes were coming in and from which political party they were originating - Arizona, Nevada, Florida. With Jewish voters, this stunning result. 

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That's more than double what Trump got in 2020. The long and short of this election was that Donald Trump resonated with a whole lot more people than Kamala Harris did. And from the looks and sounds of regime media voices, it's going to take a very long time in the wilderness to understand that. Here's David Axelrod on CNN:



Van Jones offered similar analysis. 



Joy Reid has a problem with racist white women. 

Morning Joe on MSNBC was nothing short of a wake. Fascist, racist, misogynistic, not listening to their better angels - all the hits. They cannot begin to fathom they might be the outliers of American society. Nope. They are convinced in their elite heart of hearts that Trump is such a fascist that he conned 70 million people to vote their democracy away. 

Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama's Homeland Security secretary, was part of the Morning Joe wake Wednesday morning. Here's his uplifting assessment. 



George Wallace's 19% is now the majority opinion, he says. That's right. If you are a first-time Black Republican voter, of which there are millions, or a first-time Latino Republican voter, of which there are millions, whether you're Arab-American, Jewish, any hyphenated-American that just voted for the first time for Donald Trump, you are a George Wallace segregationist. It's perhaps the most absurd argument one can make on television after the most racially-diverse Republican electorate ever just voted. As for not knowing what to tell his daughter who just had her dream of a Black woman president being able to become president, perhaps I can answer since you can't. Run someone that resonates with the American people, not someone who checks off racial, gender, or other ideological boxes. We're supposed to elect qualified people based on their qualifications, not by their skin pigment. That's the uplifting conversation to have with his daughter. If Jeh wants to be honest with her, he simply has to tell her the Democrats nominated an idiot, and the country chose not to be led for the next four years by that idiot.  

Scott Jennings over on CNN had this assessment to any on the set that would listen, which wasn't many. 

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While the left has now been rendered powerless and will go off into the wilderness for the next two years, the clock is running for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The next Senate cycle is flipped around where the GOP is on defense in a bunch of seats. We have two years to actually make improvements in people's lives. If inflation isn't curtailed, if interest rates don't go down, if the economy isn't chugging along and people are happily employed with a workable standard of living again in two years, Democrats will be back and will paralyze the final two years of Trump's term. 

Donald Trump cannot waste one day. The left, and especially regime media, will spend every waking moment trying to bait the President-Elect into responding to one false controversy or another, or trying to get him to snipe at someone who said something bad about him, not for any other reason than to distract him from getting anything constructive done.

Donald Trump and his transition team needs to avoid the debris and start today forming who will be nominated to what post and when they'll come up for hearings, and coordinate with Senate leadership as soon as they organize for the new term to get people up on the Hill and confirmed as soon as possible. They must turn Elon Musk loose immediately. Show a track record of immediate action, and this could end up being a long run in power, regardless of whether J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis emerge in 2028 as the standard-bearer. 

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Enjoy the moment, never trust regime media again, understand that until they're proven different, every poll not named Atlas Intel is probably off by a couple points to the left, and that on issues that matter, we actually are not a 50/50 country. Our side is making a more compelling argument that's resonating with a majority of Americans. The pendulum has begun to swing back in our direction.

The election wasn't that close. Trump has a mandate. It's high time to use it effectively and cross items off the list of promises as expeditiously as possible. 

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 20, 2024
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