BY THE POWER OF INCUMBENCY!

Almost half of the country looked at the way Donald Trump has functioned as president since 2017 and said, definitively, that they wanted four more years of it. https://t.co/7AudQDUFI7 via @CharlesPPierce

— Esquire (@esquire) November 4, 2020

Actually I don't think they looked at all. I think they just said to themselves "He says he's done a good job, so I guess he did. Sure, why not? Can't be any worse, can it?" That and just the general resistance to change. Oh, and the white supremacy and the general resentment that white people don't run America anymore. Never discount that. Trump picked lily-white Pence; Biden picked that woman with the name who may or may not be black (yes, I know how she identifies, I'm thinking of the Average Trump Supporter).  And a woman.  It reminded people that white men aren't in power.  There are two Americas, you know.  There's the America that poured onto the streets for George Floyd, and the America that didn't.  Thing still is, one America votes, and the other doesn't.  One America poured into the streets in the '60's, for King and against the war.  And Nixon won, both times, and shortly after Nixon, Reagan, then Bush, then Clinton (GOP Lite), and so on.  I mean, more of the country voted for Nixon the second time around than voted for Trump, and people HATED Nixon.

Just not as much as we thought, it turned out.

Such is the power of incumbency.  Well, and whiteness.  I don't discount whiteness one jot. But I'm honestly curious as to how many incumbents won (House, Senate, state races) and how many lost.

Actually, what yesterday proved to me is that most of America is not paying attention to Trump's tweets.  Or even to pronouncements that stop FoxNews in their tracks.

Fox News was in a ‘purple haze’ on election night until Trump’s wild claims gave them clarity https://t.co/ndFC32DhHv

— Raw Story (@RawStory) November 4, 2020

Nobody is really voting based on what Trump said on Twitter, or based on what on-line ad they saw.  Or TV ads, for that matter.

Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party. https://t.co/NtOl1PZEfW via @CharlesPPierce

— Esquire (@esquire) November 4, 2020

Lindsay Graham's opponent outraised him by record levels.  Lindsay was mocked relentlessly on-line for begging for money on FoxNews.  Who's laughing now?

A day after the election Trump wants the counting to continue in Nevada and Arizona (which he insists he won) while stopping it in Pennsylvania (at least) and probably Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina....

Are Trump's voters really paying attention to this?  I don't mean his "supporters," the crazies who mindlessly yell "Lock [insert name/personal pronoun here] up!" at his rallies.  I mean the people who just voted for him because they think he deserved it, or they think he stopped immigration or won the "trade war" with China or saved the economy or whatever excuse they have for excusing this wholly incompetent boob.  The thing is, those people don't know and don't care how dangerously incompetent Trump is.  They believe him when he says he stopped a war with North Korea or that Putin respects him.  They don't care the the post-war world of 1945 is about to collapse (Putin is dancing on its grave already). American isolationism that would have kept us out of that war but for Pearl Harbor, is returning with a vengeance.  I'm seriously starting to see the entire post '45 world as the aberration in American history, not the fundamental shift to taking our place as a world leader.  Oh, we did, until the '70's when Japan started selling everything we bought, and then China replaced Japan, and suddenly being a "world leader" meant finance, not industry.  Can't quite blame people for not giving a shit about abstractions like finance when the jobs they had that made them middle class fled Detroit and then everywhere else in the Rust Belt.  Lots of things went wrong from the '70's on, and we are all reaping that failure, that "Exile."  And we're all still looking for someone else to blame it on. Which, at the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, is beginning to make us look as bad as Germany. Or at least now better.

A majority of the turnout for this election seems to have voted against the clown.  If there were enough such votes in enough states, we may turn the corner.  Then again, Mitch McConnell is still in charge of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi has a smaller majority in the House, so it's at least 2 more years of the last 2 years ahead of us, which won't inspire too many people to vote out the Republicans or shake things up so Washington works again.  The most we can hope is that it won't be as bad as it would be if Trump had won re-election.  If he hasn't; can't be sure until December 14 about that.