This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated November 13, 2020
On Saturday, November 7, Joe Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania increased and he was projected the winner of the 2020 presidential election by all major media outlets. When the news came in, the majority of Americans celebrated.
There are tens of millions of Americans who are unhappy with the result, but the fact is, it was not really that close. It appears Biden will wind up with 306 electoral votes, the same total Trump received in 2016, which he has referred to as “historic” and a “blowout.” Both were sizable electoral college margins, but whereas Trump received nearly three million less votes four years ago, Biden currently has earned about five million more and when all votes have been tallied, he is projected to win the popular vote by about seven million.
It does not matter what President Trump says. There is no evidence of mass voter fraud. The Pennsylvania votes that were counted, putting Biden over the top, had all been received by Election Day. The only reason they were counted later was because the state’s Republican-controlled legislature decided it would be done that way, conforming with Trump’s strategy to delay adding in the mail-in ballots that were predominantly from Democrats, creating the appearance on Election Night that Trump had received the most votes.
It has become clear over past three decades that Republicans can rarely receive the most votes in a national election. In the eight presidential elections since 1992, Republican candidates have only received the most votes once. We have had four presidents in that twenty-eight-year span – two Democrats and two Republicans – and neither of the Republicans attained the presidency by receiving more votes than their opponent.
“Through activism, organizing, and electoral politics, I have been inspired by so many neighbors that I have learned from and leaned on.”
The day after Joe Biden officially became the President-elect marked the four-year anniversary of Trump’s 2016 Election Night win. I am, by nature, an optimist, but I felt utterly hopeless and helpless that night. I wrote at the time that, “I hate that I keep thinking, ‘I just don’t care anymore,’ because I do care, but it seems caring about things is not the virtue it used to be in this country. I guess I’ll just focus harder on trying to set an example for my boys that is the antithesis of our new leader, and hope the warmth I receive from them thaws my soul in time for the positive action that will be needed in 2020.”
I, like so many others, did not wait until 2020. Within days of the 2016 election, people in our corner of Brooklyn were already mobilizing. I began joining fellow community members who were meeting to strategize how to confront what we knew was to come and ways to win local elections in the coming years. Through activism, organizing, and electoral politics, I have been inspired by so many neighbors that I have learned from and leaned on.
On Election Night 2016, I told my two young sons that I was sorry. I was so disheartened that so many had decided they were fine with setting an example for our children that you do not have to be prepared, you do not have to be thoughtful, you do not have to be kind or even just resemble the basic traits of a decent human being. Learning the results of this election, I was buoyed by the realization that by the time my 6 and 4-year-old boys are 10 and 8, I will know they have not lived the past few years in a country led by someone who proudly exhibits all the traits and behaviors my wife and I are raising them not to have.
In August, I wrote about the anniversary of the racially motivated murder of Yusuf Hawkins thirty-one years ago and how, as a kid, witnessing the hatred from members of my own community in the aftermath has never left me. At the moment Joe Biden, with the nation’s first African American woman to be elected Vice-President standing nearby, began his speech as President-elect Saturday night, I heard something on my block in Bensonhurst I could have never imagined in 1991: celebratory fireworks. We have not solved all of our problems with one election, but it feels great to feel hope.
