President Trump surely has given the media fodder to fulminate over whether he’ll accept the results of the 2020 election, but there’s plenty of reason to panic about Democrats rejecting it, too. And no, it’s not just Stacey Abrams, who’s allowed by the media to engage in the delusion that she’s the rightfully elected governor of Georgia. If anything, top Democrats might revolt against the election results if, after an inevitably drawn-out ballot-counting process, the electoral map looks similar to Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.
“A group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania,” writes Ben Smith in his Sunday column. “For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had. But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College. In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.”
Lest we rewrite history, let’s not forget that Hillary Clinton’s refusal to concede publicly on election night was unprecedented for a contest lost by so many electoral votes. If the top Democratic operative who executed the Clinton campaign’s not-a-concession election night speech is already preparing to contest an election loss, it’s highly likely that other top Democratic brass are as well.
Biden campaigned as the return-to-normalcy candidate, and despite ample pressure from the Left to back plenty of norm destruction, Biden himself has largely rebuffed that approach. But the media and political apparatus surrounding him has already baked in the potential for a campaign unlike any other. Biden’s campaign heavily limits his media appearances, most recently rejecting a Fox News interview with the hard-hitting Chris Wallace. And now, there’s a slowly growing refrain from media activists to cancel the debates, even though that’s unlikely to work in Biden’s favor.
Clinton may have conceded the election the morning after Election Day, but Democrats deflected for the next three years, claiming the election was successfully rigged first by Facebook and then by Russia. Neither was true, but that doesn’t stop plenty of the party to view Trump as an illegitimate ruler.
Even if Biden himself plays by the normal rules, it’s not hard to see either Team Biden and Team Trump rejecting the election’s legitimacy. That bodes poorly not just for partisan relations but the precedent of the peaceful transfer of power as a whole.
