Did CNN Win the Election Yet?

All eyes wait and wonder

It is Wednesday. At this point it looks like Joe Biden will win the election but Donald Trump is not going to go gently into that good night. Let it be known that Joe Biden did not actually win this election because Joe Biden had nothing to do with the outcome. Neither did his running mate, Kamala Harris, as neither of them made much of an appearance on the campaign trail. In fact, this could be the first election run almost entirely by social media such that Biden and Harris could not even exist at all but have a great social media team and the results would be the same.

Money poured in to an unprecedented degree and lovely, convincing ads flooded the zones in all of the swing states. Voters were pushed to turn in their ballots early based on that massive influence. The media kept telling people how to think, distorting the facts and inflating the polls. Their collective bias completely unmasked.

By contrast, Trump was doing four and five rallies a day, his people were on the ground registering voters - he brought in new voters from all demographics and had to do battle with an unprecedented level of media and social media influence.

It is a miracle that Trump did as well as he did considering. Democrats should not be celebrating this. It should be a wake-up call.

While it’s true that more people were listening to Ben Shapiro on iTunes than Pod Save America. More people were watching Fox News and Tucker Carlson. But they make up a fraction of the massive media machine that had its thumb on the scale to defeat the president who had declared war against them.

Thus, despite my being an early Biden supporter and a former Democrat (I am now an independent) it remains hard for me to be happy about the outcome. It’s hard not to look at this election and not see it as the people vs. the deep state. And trust me, I never thought I’d be one of those people that would even think there was a “deep state” but if there was one, we just saw it win an election.

The Democrats appear not to have learned the lesson as to why Trump rose in the first place or why this election is still so close. They seem to think they were on the right side of the bigots, the racists and the white supremacists. But to believe that is to not spend any time in Trump world and to see it only as it is described by the media. It is depressing to have seen Trump call them “fake news” and then to watch them become “fake news” right before our very eyes. But that is what happened. They took a credibility hit that I’m not sure they will ever get back.

So what it looks like to me, Democrats did not get their blue wave. In fact, they barely won. That means they are not as persuasive at convincing this country, despite a massive turnout, that theirs is the better half. And in fact, I would imagine that we will see a flip of the House and a much more red majority in the Senate two years from now as the forces that oppose what the Democrats now stand for rise up to take back the government.

Either way, I know a lot of people who will sleep easier at night with Biden in the White House. I will sleep easier at night knowing they are sleeping easier at night. But there is no regulation done by Biden that won’t be undone in a few short years. This election isn't about policy. It is about personality. Just like it was in 1976 when Ford was beaten by Carter.

I see so many good Democrats still trying to push for policy and were hoping that a Blue Wave would put them in that spot. I was one of those people who thought that would come to pass. But now I know that won’t be. Democrats will continue to pull far left and the conservatives will continue to rise up to oppose them. Thus, Biden is likely not to be Nixon in 1972 but rather Jimmy Carter in 1976 who was the last bulwark before the pendulum swung all the right right.

One thing I would say is this: try to make friends with people on the other side of the aisle. Try to support the free exchange of ideas. Try to get to know the people who put Trump in power and why. People are craving real talk from politicians - not canned speeches. They want someone who sees them. And even if you don’t believe Trump did see them, even if you see him as a con man and a fraud - THEY Believed he did because he made them believe it.

My new way of living life is to not hate anyone. I’m going to try that and see how it goes. To me, that is how we repair a divided country. And that is the only way.

What a wild night.