They flooded downtown D.C. holding patriotic flags and signs, a mass of Americans filling the streets to show their support for the president. The media would ignore them, of course -- but the sea of Million MAGA marchers, like the dozens of campaign rallies leading up to the election, would be hard to overlook. Chants of "Count every vote!" rang out -- a cry echoed in courtrooms across the states, where the Trump campaign fights on. Whether his efforts will be enough to save his presidency, no one knows. But could they save an election system bogged down by doubts and questions? That, in the long run, may be just as important.
"It's going to be that I got 74 million votes, and I lost?" an incredulous President Trump told columnist Michael Goodwin. "It's not possible." Not since Grover Cleveland's reelection campaign in 1888, the Federalist confirms, "has a sitting president won more votes the second time around and still lost, which is one reason he successfully ran again four years later. To put this in perspective, Obama lost five million votes between his 2008 and 2012 elections. He is the only president to have lost voters and still won re-election."
At the end of the day, President Trump shrugged, "I can't tell you what's going to happen." But, he said, "it's hard to come to terms [with the results] when they won't let your poll watchers in to observe [the counting]." And that counting is especially important now, with less than 70,000 votes separating the candidates across the handful of deciding states. With concerns about the voting systems and ballot dumps swirling, it's no wonder 70 percent of Republicans don't believe the results have been free and fair.
Late Friday, Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chair Trey Trainor confirmed those fears, telling Americans, "I do believe that there is voter fraud taking place in these [contested areas]. Otherwise, they would allow observers to go in." Our whole political system, he insisted, "is based upon transparency to avoid the appearance of corruption." If the law isn't followed, Trainor agreed, then the outcome is "illegitimate." These allegations by the Trump campaign, Trainor said, are "very valid," and they need to be "fully vetted" by the courts.
Meanwhile, concerns continue to swirl around Dominion Voting Systems -- not just about the millions of votes the president argued had been deleted in a "glitch," but also about the company's ideological leanings. Reporters dug through the FEC's financial reports and discovered 96 of the company's staffers had donated to the Democrats' 2020 political cause. Only four percent of Dominion employees gave to Republicans -- raising plenty of eyebrows about the machines' "malfunctions." The storyline sounded even fishier when Rudy Giuliani pointed out that the head of the machines' software company, Smartmatic -- Peter Neffenger -- is part of Biden's transition team.
Twenty-eight states used those voting machines. "Beyond this election," Giuliani argued, "this whole thing has to be examined as a national security matter. The governors who gave contracts to this company never bothered to do any due diligence."
Other things, experts say, just plain don't add up. Pollster Patrick Basham, who's British, continues to maintain that the election was "stolen." In a column for a U.K. newspaper, he points to Biden's unusual numbers in certain cities. How curious, he writes, that "Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia." In some cases, he said, citing analyst Robert Barnes, in these "big cities in swing states run by Democrats...the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters."
For now, conservatives are taking consolation in the biggest upsets of the year: the GOP's incredible gains in the House. When all is said and done, Republicans could be within five seats of the majority -- a far cry from the shellacking the media predicted. Fourteen races are still being certified, but on Friday, Republican Young Kim (R) managed to flip another Democratic seat in California. Judging by the GOP's numbers in the districts that haven't been called, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could be looking at the smallest House majority in 100 years.
Inside the party, angry finger-pointers are everywhere. "Progressives refuse to take any responsibility," the editors of the Wall Street Journal explain -- and yet, their radical policies are almost certainly to blame. "House Democrats turned sharply leftward in the last two years as they indulged progressive priorities across the policy spectrum." The result? Republican candidates had a field day with political ads, blasting every bit of their extreme agenda: "socialism, defunding the police, raising taxes, and eliminating oil and gas drilling." If they didn't know it before, Democrats know it now: Americans don't want what the far-Left is selling. And if Pelosi and company ignore that fact, 2022 is another wake-up call in the making.