Want to Guess How Close Trump and the GOP Came to Winning…Everything in 2020?

Donald Trump is toxic. The GOP is finished. Joe Biden won; he has a mandate — all of these things are false. Also, it would seem demography is not destiny and higher turnout isn’t an automatic lock for Democrats. We have another autopsy of sorts from The Washington Post on the 2020 election. Want to take a guess how many votes Republicans needed to control everything? One million votes, two million? Nope. It didn’t even break 100,000. It was 90,000 votes. Republicans just needed 90,000 votes to control all of Washington this past election cycle. Literally minor changes in the presidential, House, and Senate races could have led to the GOP coming into 2021 with a unified government. There are many ways to skin the electoral cat as some have said in the past. It’s not all grounded in the popular vote. The Electoral College strategy is different. Are we shocked that Donald Trump had fewer popular votes than Joe Biden? No, we knew this was going to be the case, as the areas that are fastest growing are typically Democratic bastions, which also do next to nothing regarding expanding the Left’s ability to reach 270 any easier. What about Florida? Yeah, the state has become more diverse for sure. It’s also more Republican than it was back in 2000 — go figure. Demography is not destiny and there are a host of issues where civil war can break out among Democrats, especially regarding who is filling the campaign coffers.

Non-whites may vote reliably Democratic, but white educated liberals were the ones who filled the war chests and gave money at disproportionate rates. The ones who sign the checks will always get their phone calls answered. I see a big issue with that on the horizon, but we’ll just wait and see what happens. Let Democrats be the ones who cause their own car crash.

Anyway, here’s the breakdown of how close the Republican Party came to winning the whole show (via WaPo):

Republicans came, at most, 43,000 votes from winning each of the three levers of power. And that will surely temper any move toward drastic corrective action vis-a-vis former president Donald Trump.

While Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than four points and the electoral college 306 to 232, the result was much closer to flipping than that would suggest. Biden won the three decisive states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — by 0.6 percentage points or less, which was similar to Trump’s 2016 victory. If you flip fewer than 43,000 votes across those three states, the electoral college is tied 269 to 269. In that case, Trump would probably have won, given that the race would be decided by one vote for each House delegation, of which Republicans control more.

There are several reasons to argue that Biden has a mandate, including that he won more eligible voters than any candidate in half a century and won the highest percentage for any challenger to an incumbent president since 1932. But the fact remains that we weren’t that far away from a second Trump term.

The number of votes to flip the result was similar in the House. As the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman noted in light of Tenney’s win, fewer than 32,000 votes could have flipped the five seats that Republicans would have needed to win the House majority — Illinois’s 17th District, Iowa’s 3rd, New Jersey’s 7th, Texas’s 15th and Virginia’s 7th.

While incumbent David Perdue (R-Ga.) lost the closest Senate race in a runoff last month with now-Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) by about 55,000 votes, he previously came very close to avoiding the runoff altogether. On Election Day, he took 49.7 percent of the vote — fewer than 14,000 votes from winning the race outright. That would have foreclosed any chance Democrats had at winning the Senate.

So, 43,000 votes for president, 32,000 votes for the House and 14,000 votes for the Senate. Shifts of 0.6 percent for president, 2.2 percent for the House, and 0.3 percent for the Senate…..

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To read the rest of this article, click here. The article first appeared on January 10, 2021 at Townhall.