Was the 2020 presidential election legitimate?

I think so, but the contrary opinion is neither "a lie" nor unreasonable

The mainstream media is taking Iowa caucus-goers to task because polling indicates that approximately two-thirds of them don’t believe the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. This view extends beyond Trump supporters. Trump won slightly more than 50 percent of caucus-goers. The percentage of those who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential race is considerably higher than that.

But even if 100 percent of Iowa caucus-goers believed the election was illegitimate, that wouldn’t help demonstrate the truth of this view. It might just illustrate the dogmatism of this group and/or the ability of Trump to pull the wool over the eyes of gullible Republicans.

So let’s consider the merits.

We need to begin by making a distinction between a “stolen” election and an “illegitimate” one. This distinction is one the liberal media wants us to miss — as in this sentence from Dan Balz of the Washington Post:

Asked whether Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, about 2 in 3 [Iowa caucus-goers] said he was not, siding with Trump’s false but persistent claim that the election was rife with fraud — “stolen,” in his words.

See what Balz is doing here? He’s assuming that the answer to whether Biden was legitimately elected turns on whether the election was so rife with fraud as to be stolen.

This assumption is fallacious. To see why, consider two hypotheticals.

In the first one, voters are only allowed to cast votes between noon and 4:00 p.m. on Election Day. Would this election be “stolen” in the sense of being rife fraud? Not without evidence that votes were miscounted or, at a minimum, that the outcome would have been different without the restriction. But would this election be “legitimate?” Not in my opinion, because the restriction isn’t legitimate. Nor would my opinion be different if courts had upheld the unreasonable restriction.

In this hypothetical, though, the ability to vote has been curbed. That fact alone would be enough for the mainstream media to call foul — and rightly so.

But now consider a hypothetical election in which no restrictions on voting are enforced. Folks who show up to vote are allowed to do so without any need to demonstrate that they have registered, that they are citizens, or that they are 18 years-old or more.

Would this election be stolen in the sense of being rife with fraud. Not without evidence that votes were miscounted or, at a minimum, that the outcome would have been different had eligibility requirements been enforced. But would this election be “legitimate?” Not in my view — not even if courts had upheld the ridiculously lax voting procedure.

In the poll Iowa caucus-goers about the 2020 election, the question wasn’t about fraud or election theft (so I don’t know what the response to that question would have been). It was whether the election was legitimate.

As to that question, there’s no doubt that in 2020, voting rules were changed in many jurisdictions to make it more difficult to ensure the eligibility of those who cast ballots. The changes were upheld by courts in almost all cases. But, as I’ve tried to show, if the rules are outrageous enough, judicial approval should not be sufficient to make an election legitimate in the eyes of the public.

The changes to the voting rules in 2020 were not outrageous enough for me to conclude the election was illegitimate. That’s my opinion.

But given the substantial changes that made it more difficult to enforce longstanding and legitimate restrictions on who can vote, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to disagree with my opinion and to conclude that the election was not legitimate.

It follows that (1) this view is not a “lie,” but rather an opinion with some basis in fact. and (2) Iowa caucus-goers should not be treated as rubes or dupes for holding this opinion.

Now let’s shift the focus to Donald Trump. Trump does more than claim the election was illegitimate. He contends that there was rampant fraud in the vote counting — so much fraud that he wasn’t just wrongfully denied victory, he was denied a landslide win. But he has never produced evidence that proves either of these two implausible claims.

Furthermore, his team embraced claims that the Dominion voting machines were programmed to miscount the vote and that that mother-daughter vote-counting team in Georgia committed fraud. These claims are false and those who made them on Trump’s behalf have faced, or will face, serious consequences for doing so.

Thus, Trump’s take on the election, unlike that expressed by the majority of Iowa caucus-goers, is unreasonable and indefensible.

There’s also the question of whether, even if Trump’s position were reasonable, he should (1) have taken it and (2) maintained it for all these years.

In my lifetime, there are two models for how a candidate behaves when he is declared the loser of a presidential election he believes he probably won. The first model is Richard Nixon after he was declared the loser of the 1960 election. Given the indications of actual fraud in Texas and Illinois, Nixon probably had better grounds for denying he lost than Trump had in 2020.

Yet, Nixon never challenged the result. He said that doing so would be bad for the country. (Note that Nixon eventually was elected president. Trump might be elected again, but he might not be. His prospects would probably be better if he had followed the Nixon model or, at least, the Al Gore model discussed next.)

Unlike Nixon, Al Gore contested his defeat in 2000. But once he lost in the Supreme Court, he conceded as graciously as he could (in mid-December) and that was the end of it.

By contrast, Trump pressed on with his claims of a “steal,” even after his hand-picked Attorney General told him there was no basis for them. He summoned supporters to Washington to protest his defeat and to pressure Mike Pence into preventing its ratification. And to this day, he maintains the election was stolen.

This claim is unsupported. In any case, for the good of the country, Trump should long ago have stopped making it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable for members of the public to question the legitimacy of the 2010 election. Indeed, it is not unreasonable for them to do so.