Jim Geraghty of National Review Online explores reaction to 2020 presidential election results.
Pro-Trump protesters and Antifa clashed in some pretty ugly scenes this weekend.
After a year of riots, looting, violent clashes, you didn’t have to be a wide-eyed paranoid to worry the runaway passions would lead to widespread violence on Election Day or shortly thereafter. In America’s biggest cities, downtown stores boarded up their windows in expectations of Election Night violence.
And then Election Day came and went with . . . little or no violence. Protests, certainly, but nothing like the widespread rage and destruction that was feared. Not even Portland was as bad as locals expected.
Since Election Night, President Trump has stubbornly insisted he won in a landslide and that the election was stolen from him. We’ve seen a plethora of court cases in several key swing states. We’ve seen former national-security adviser Michael Flynn endorse a call for “limited martial law” and a re-vote run by the military. We’ve seen Texas GOP state party chairman Allen West imply succession, declaring, “perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.”
And yet, with all kinds of provocations and outrageous statements and people metaphorically throwing gasoline on the fire . . . by and large, we haven’t seen violence. The clashes in downtown Washington D.C. Saturday night were a pretty rare exception to how most Americans are responding to the election results.
You may recall that one pre-election simulation run by the “Transition Integrity Project” envisioned, “National Guard troops destroy[ing] thousands of ballots in Democratic-leaning ZIP codes, to applause on social media from Trump supporters.” …
… Except we didn’t have a clear winner Election Night (the results looked like they were starting to go Biden’s way) and . . . things turned out more or less okay, at least in terms of politically motivated violence. We’re not in a political crisis.
