Back in 2000, like many on the Right, I became exasperated as Al Gore dragged the nation through weeks of recounts and court cases because he refused to acknowledge that he had lost.
I recently found this going through some old things, so we can count it as a receipt:
Found mine! pic.twitter.com/6VDOo4pp3H
— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 6, 2020
Yet the truth is, President Trump is acting like a worse sore loser than Gore.
Gore pursued a number of legal challenges aimed at overturning the election. Despite the popular myth that the U.S. Supreme Court handed the election to George W. Bush, in reality, media recounts after the decision found that even had the court ruled the other way, Bush still would have won. My colleague Tim Carney has debunked the myths about Bush v. Gore in more detail here and here.
With all of that said, Gore’s behavior in 2000 was much more defensible than Trump’s in the past week.
Yes, it took 37 days for Gore to concede — and only after he had exhausted all legal options.
But the 2000 election came down to one state in which the candidates were separated by a few hundred votes. It was at least conceivable that, depending on how certain votes were counted, he might have been able to overtake Bush.
The current situation is orders of magnitude different. The reasons are that Trump is not only behind in one state, but several. And that he isn’t down by a few hundred votes, but tens of thousands.
That means that the legal arguments Trump would have to deploy are going to be different in each state, and the deficit he wants to erase is significantly greater than what Gore needed.
To get into it in a bit more detail, let us say that Trump is awarded the delegates from North Carolina and Alaska. That would bring him to 232 electoral votes, or 38 votes short of the 270 he needs to be reelected.
To win, Trump would have to overcome Biden’s leads in at least three of the five states mentioned below. I have listed them with the electoral votes in parentheses, followed Trump’s current deficit.
Wisconsin (10) Trump down by around 20,000 votes.
Arizona (11) Trump down by about 13,000 votes.
Georgia (16) Trump down about 14,000 votes.
Michigan (16) Trump down about 146,000 votes.
Pennsylvania (20) Trump down about 48,000 votes.
It should be noted that other than Arizona, Biden has been gaining votes since election night, as more early and mail-in ballots get counted. In other words, as time goes on, it is becoming an even heavier lift for Trump.
Though Trump has been making sweeping claims about the election having been stolen and of a massive number of illegal votes, he has not substantiated these claims. Even though he has vowed that he was going to win in court, nobody in his orbit has outlined the sequence of legal challenges, that if successful, would allow him to retake the leads. For months he’s been warning about looming mail-in ballot fraud, and instead of having a crack legal team on the ground and in place to pursue a real legal strategy, he’s going about everything in his typical ad hoc manner — with Rudy Giuliani winging it on television.
As I wrote last week, Trump clearly does not have a legal strategy that will win him the election. The only point of him contesting the election is that his ego is too fragile to allow him to simply admit he lost.
Because of his devoted following and the willingness of many to embrace claims that affirm their worldview, Trump has ensured that tens of millions of Americans will have no faith in the outcome of the election. They will donate money and fume to friends and family and on social media, and if they are professionals, they will write and go on TV and radio to parrot out Trump’s unfounded claims. And Republicans, unable to risk a backlash from their base, will at least indulge Trump’s nonsense even when they don’t fully embrace it.
We are, happily, not living in the early stages of the Third Reich. Biden will be certified as the winner next month and sworn in as president on Jan. 20. Unfortunately, Trump is going to drag the country through weeks, perhaps months, more of this just because he lacks the inner strength to admit he lost. Of course, it’s this sort of unpresidential attitude that likely cost him the presidency in the first place.
