Joe Biden, asked recently if he had considered the possibility that President Trump may refuse to concede defeat in the election, answered that he had. But he was “absolutely convinced,” the former vice president said reassuringly, that if such a thing happens, military personnel will “escort him from the White House with great dispatch.” What a relief!
The exchange brings to mind the 2016 campaign, when media personalities speculated that Mr. Trump would refuse to concede to Hillary Clinton. The hypothesis was never tested, Mr. Trump having had the bad manners to win, but it turned out to be they who refused to concede defeat—not by contesting the election results but by persuading themselves and half the country that Mr. Trump had won by illegal means and generally behaving like spoiled children for the next four years.
I suspect Mr. Trump would have conceded the night of the election (which Mrs. Clinton did not do), for the simple reason that he neither expected nor particularly wanted to win. In the event that Mr. Trump fails to win re-election, he will depart willingly. Not graciously, perhaps, but willingly and at the appointed time.
The more interesting question is: What will Democrats do if Mr. Biden loses? What idiotic conspiracy theory will they concoct to explain their defeat?
An anti-George W. Bush protester at a rally in Tallahassee, Fla., Dec. 13, 2000.
Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty ImagesI mean no disrespect to my liberal friends when I say, to borrow Mr. Biden’s phrase, that I am absolutely convinced that Democrats won’t accept the result if the Republican wins. I say this because, with only two exceptions, liberals have considered every GOP presidential victory in the last half-century more or less illegitimate. The two exceptions were Richard Nixon’s defeat of George McGovern in 1972 and Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984. Both were so lopsided as to make allegations of dirty-trickery a waste of effort. (Nixon’s re-election was tainted by crimes, but they didn’t contribute to his victory in any meaningful way.)
After every other Republican presidential victory from 1968 forward, however, Democrats invented cockamamie theories that the GOP had won by illegitimate means.
Liberals have long believed that Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in 1968 by secretly telling the South Vietnamese not to participate in the Paris peace talks, thus depriving the outgoing Johnson administration of the diplomatic triumph it deserved. Older liberals still cling tightly to this theory, but it’s hooey. Saigon had already decided not to participate in the Paris talks because Hanoi was demanding unconditional U.S. withdrawal. In any case, the disgrace was Lyndon Johnson’s, not Nixon’s. The outgoing administration knew the talks didn’t stand a chance but wanted the appearance of a diplomatic win to boost Vice President Humphrey’s chances.
Incredible as it seems, liberal commentators still attribute Reagan’s 1980 victory to his use of the term “states’ rights” in an August speech to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss. “I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people,” Reagan said. “I believe in states’ rights.” That supposedly signaled to racist Democrats across the South that Reagan was on their side and they could safely vote Republican. (Reagan carried Mississippi by less than 1.5 points.)
If that one doesn’t convince you, there’s the “October surprise” theory. Reagan surrogates purportedly negotiated with the Iranian government—“colluded” would be another way to put it—to delay the release of 52 American hostages until after the election. There was never much evidence for this allegation—two congressional investigations came up with nothing—but liberal pundits and politicos obsessed over it for years.
George H.W. Bush defeated Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988 by seven million popular votes and carried 40 states, but in the minds of liberals Bush won because a political-action committee that supported his campaign ran a “racially charged” television ad portraying Mr. Dukakis as soft on crime.
The ad was accurate and fair. In 1976 Mr. Dukakis vetoed a bill that would have banned prison furloughs for first-degree murderers. Ten years later Willie Horton—who with two accomplices had fatally stabbed a 17-year-old gas-station attendant 19 times after he handed over the contents of the cash register—was let out on weekend furlough and didn’t return. Ten months after that, he pistol-whipped, knifed and tied up a man and raped his fiancée in Maryland. The ad recounted the facts straightforwardly and included a photo of Mr. Horton, who is black. Liberal authors and documentary filmmakers routinely imply that the ad was both racist and decisive in the election’s outcome. It was neither.
The next Republican to win a presidential election was George W. Bush in 2000. He won, in the imagination of Democrats then and since, by stealing Florida. Official recounts proved Mr. Bush narrowly won Florida, and so did unofficial ones conducted later by the media. That didn’t stop Democrats from treating his election as the illegitimate result of a partisan Supreme Court decision.
In 2004 Mr. Bush outpolled Sen. John Kerry by more than three million votes nationwide and 100,000 in the pivotal state, Ohio. Even so, some prominent Democrats loudly insisted that the Ohio vote had been rigged to swing the election to President Bush. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California lodged a formal challenge when Congress counted the electoral votes in January 2005.
In 2016 Mr. Trump was accused of “colluding” with Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Mrs. Clinton. How exactly Messrs. Trump and Putin achieved this amazing result, and why Mr. Trump has since failed to exhibit such diabolical cunning, remains a mystery. Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation found no evidence of collusion, and Mr. Trump’s despisers speak little of it now. But Democratic orthodoxy regards the Trump presidency as illegitimate anyway.
Unless Mr. Trump wins an improbable landslide, Democrats will claim he stole another election. He’s illegitimate now, in their eyes, but he’ll be even more illegitimate if he wins again. The only question is what conspiracy they will invent to explain it. The election is four months away and already several theories have emerged. Franklin Foer published a long essay in the Atlantic’s June issue enumerating ways in which Vladimir Putin used disinformation and cyberattacks to disrupt the 2016 election and is poised to do so again.
The president now seems likely to lose. But if he wins, may I suggest an alternative theory? A Trump victory in November will have nothing to do with the Russians or the Chinese or the coronavirus or “voter suppression.” It will have everything to do with Democrats’ foul behavior over the previous four years, born of the conviction that they can’t possibly lose an election fair and square.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
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