Byron York’s Daily Memo: Electoral College Day

ELECTORAL COLLEGE DAY. Today electors from around the country gather in the states to cast votes for president in the Electoral College. As it stands now, Joe Biden has 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 232. Although there have been many twists and turns in the 2020 campaign, none of President Trump’s legal challenges has changed that fundamental total: 306 to 232. Once the voting takes place, Biden will be one big step closer to taking the oath of office as president.

After Trump’s loss in the Supreme Court Friday night — the justices rejected the case filed on his behalf by the state of Texas against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — I wrote a special edition of the newsletter saying that Trump had run out of options for further challenges and that it was time for him to accept the election result. The reaction among Trump supporters on Twitter was hostile, to say the least. They strongly believe Trump should keep fighting and that he will prevail and remain president come inauguration day, January 20. “There are still lawsuits pending!” tweeted one woman. “Do you not agree that they should be heard first?”

Remember that, to win, Trump would have to overturn the election results in at least three states. All those results have been certified. There is no lawsuit pending that would do that. And Trump’s suits, the ones he has filed personally, that his campaign has filed, and that have been filed by others on his behalf, have not brought him any closer to that result. He has run out of runway, as legal analyst Jonathan Turley has remarked.

There is obvious intensity among Trump supporters. There always has been. And it is not a surprise that there would be an extra measure of intensity surrounding the election. But there’s even more than that now. One possible reason is the prevalence of the belief before the election, among some Trump supporters, that the president would win in a landslide. When that did not happen — when the actual result varied wildly from expectations — it was only natural that they would look for an explanation.

But a Trump landslide was never in the cards. (Remember that there were those who predicted a Biden landslide, and they were angry that the race turned out to be close.) The fact is, before the election, the range of reasonable possibilities included both a Trump win and a Biden win. A Biden victory, fueled by narrow wins in three states — Biden won by a total of 43,809 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin combined — was always within the range of expectable results. But it didn’t seem possible to some who were sure there would be a landslide.

Still, it happened. And now, with the Electoral College meeting today, the vote counting is just about over. (The last big step occurs on January 6, when Congress certifies the Electoral College results.) So now, given that some did not see the Friday night newsletter special edition, I’m reprinting it here. And, as always, thank you for reading. From Friday:

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TIME FOR TRUMP TO STOP. President Trump’s defenders have pointed out many times, correctly, that he has every right to pursue legal challenges to election results in states he lost narrowly. Going to court is not staging a coup or plotting to destroy democracy, as some of Trump’s adversaries have charged. It is the way people, even the President of the United States, pursue claims in the American system. So even though many of the cases brought by Trump and his allies have been far-fetched, and he has lost nearly all of them, there was no great harm in bringing them.

But the time has come to end it. Monday is the day electors meet in the states to cast Electoral College votes for president. The states have already certified the results of their elections; the total is 306 electoral votes for Joe Biden and 232 for Trump. None of the president’s challenges has resulted in a change in any of those state totals, and he would need that to happen in not one, not two, but three states — say, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — in order to win. Instead, Biden will win the presidency with 306 votes, unless a “faithless elector” or two makes his winning total slightly smaller. (Remember in 2016, when some desperate Democrats hoped droves of electors committed to Trump would abandon that commitment? It didn’t work.)

On Friday evening, the Supreme Court rejected the president’s last big challenge, the lawsuit filed by the state of Texas against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. There was no way in the world the Court, at the behest of one state, would throw out election results in four other states. There was no basis on which to do it, it was not called for by the Constitution, and it would have set a terrible precedent that would surely plague our politics in years to come. In the end, the justices decided not to take the case at all. Only two, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, said the Court should have taken the case, but even they said they “would not grant other relief” and expressed “no view on any other issue.” With that, Trump’s hope of the nation’s highest court stopping certification of the election died.

Recently some people around the president have suggested that the deadline for settling the election, once thought to be December 14, is really much later than that. Perhaps it is January 6, 2021, when Congress is scheduled to certify the results of the Electoral College. Top Trump campaign aide Jason Miller recently tweeted that December 14 “isn’t necessarily the end date” of the process. “All about January 6 when the new Congress tallies up the electoral votes,” Miller said. But there is no case currently in the courts that could possibly lead to the switching of enough electoral votes to re-elect the president.

That’s not to say Republicans have not uncovered serious problems with the way some states conducted their elections. To take one example, as the Trump legal team has pointed out, the actions of ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Georgia on election night are suspicious and need investigation. The official explanation of events has changed, and there should be a trustworthy accounting of what happened. There are questionable events in other states that need to be pursued as well. By whom? It seems unlikely many in the press will be interested. Perhaps a conservative philanthropist could endow an Institute for the Study of the 2020 Election. Seriously — elections leave an enormous trail of data that can take a long time to analyze. Given the questions surrounding this election, especially involving the exponential increase in voting by mail, it is important that the data be scrutinized, if only for the purpose of preserving public trust in the nation’s institutions.

Beyond that, there is one serious issue that needs to be resolved in a case from Pennsylvania. There, the state supreme court essentially created election law — a task the Constitution gives to the state legislatures — when it extended the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots in direct contradiction of state law. The Supreme Court needs to resolve the question of election boards or courts essentially making election law in states around the country.

In the big picture, the election results were not terribly surprising. Donald Trump had a lot of good luck in 2016 and a lot of bad luck in 2020. He faced terrible headwinds all year. Also, in 2016, he won by narrowly winning a few key states. In 2020, he lost by narrowly losing in a few key states. The result was not outside the range of reasonable probability — especially after Trump endured four years of 24/7 beating from the Resistance, NeverTrumpers, elements inside his own government, and many of the nation’s largest media organizations.

That, in the end, was the real election interference, and Trump supporters have every reason to be angry for a long time. The effort to remove the president from office began before he even took office. An alliance of Trump antagonists in federal law enforcement, intelligence, and the media sought to undermine him from the first moment. From the slick maneuver to publicize the slanders of the Steele dossier to the effort to nail General Michael Flynn to James Comey’s game of assuring Trump he was not under investigation, while leaving the public impression that he was, and then to the years-long Mueller investigation, in which the special counsel discovered early on that the collusion accusation could not be confirmed yet allowed the probe to go on and on — through all that, Trump faced unprecedented efforts to cripple his presidency and make sure he would not be re-elected. In late 2019, House Democrats even impeached the president specifically in hopes that it would weaken him so much that he could not a second term.

So of course Republicans are upset at what has happened. Despite it all, Trump accomplished an enormous number of things — in terms of achievements, his was certainly the most impressive Republican presidency since Ronald Reagan. But the voters’ mood, fueled by a frenzied media, turned against him. Now, after the Supreme Court decision, he can no longer sustain challenges to that verdict. It’s time to move on.