Written by Nicholas Vetrisek
Last month, the media called the presidential race for Joe Biden. While the election has not been officially certified by election authorities, and President Trump is filing lawsuits alleging fraud, most experts believe Joe Biden will be the next president. If Biden does become the president, he will have had the most coincidentally successful election in U.S. history.
Joe Biden has supposedly received nearly 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million. This is odd given that he committed two of the largest sins in political campaigning, he didn’t knock doors, nor did he hold rallies. Anyone who works in politics, Democrat or Republican, would tell you that instructing your staff not to canvas neighborhoods or knock doors is a death sentence for any campaign. It is essential for community outreach and getting out the vote.
In addition to not knocking doors, he rarely held rallies, and when he did, they usually attracted less than 100 people. This is in contrast to Donald Trump, who frequently filled stadiums even during the pandemic and often had so many people that news organizations were worried about the rallies being super spreader events. Rallies are one of the best ways to gauge voter enthusiasm and it’s hard to believe that someone like Biden who could oftentimes only get a few dozen people at rallies is somehow the most popular president in history by popular vote.
Biden supporters may claim that due to the pandemic old political tools like canvassing and rallies were obsolete, and that could be possible. Maybe Joe Biden had an amazing social media campaign, experts claimed this was instrumental in Trump’s victory. So did Biden’s social media lead him to victory in 2020? The answer is no.
Looking at data from November 1st, two days before the election, Joe Biden had 11.8 million followers on Twitter compared to Trump’s 87.4 million followers. The same goes for Facebook where Biden had 3.8 million followers to Trump’s 30.6 million. In addition, while Trump rallies routinely get tens of thousands of views on Youtube, there are rarely more than two thousand viewers on a Joe Biden stream at any given time, including now. If Joe Biden is the most popular president in history, it was not because of voter outreach or social media messaging, so what was it?
Perhaps it was because of record Democrat turnout and a powerful coalition. Democrats claimed that a blue wave was coming in 2018 so maybe it finally materialized? It was not that either. At every level except the executive branch, Democrats have lost. They have the smallest lead in the house in the party’s history, they lost two state legislatures, they lost a governor’s seat, and they are projected to still be the minority party in the senate. Joe Biden didn’t even win as many counties as Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost. Clinton won 487 counties while Biden won 477, yet he somehow won the election
Was Trump just unpopular, then? The answer is quite the opposite. Donald Trump is one of the most popular presidents in Republican history. He had a 94% approval rating in the Republican primaries. No president, Republican or Democrat, has ever lost reelection with 75% or more of the primary vote. The only presidents to have a higher percentage in their party are Clinton, Obama, Eisenhower, and Nixon. Trump also has the highest share of minority voters of any Republican since 1960 and increased his share of black voters by 50%. This is all while solidifying Florida and Ohio as red states. He is also the first president in almost 150 years to “lose” while gaining more votes during his reelection bid, 11 million to be precise.
If Trump’s campaign ran a better social media campaign, had more community outreach, held infinitely larger rallies, and ran a very popular candidate that gained 11 million votes from last time while siphoning large amounts of votes from historical Democratic powerbases, then how did Joe Biden win?
