By Glynn Wilson –

In case you’ve still been holding your breath this week and you’re not quite sure that Democrat Joe Biden really is president-elect, maybe thinking that Donald Trump could still find a way to remain president embattled behind high security walls the White House, let’s just put this stake through his heart and this nail in his coffin.

A view of the South side of the White House, five days after the 2020 election: Glynn Wilson

The New York Times and every news organization in the land, even Fox News, has declared Biden the winner and Trump the loser. The Times is so confident of this outcome that the editors have now taken the Electoral College map off the front page of the NYTimes website. You now have to dig around in the Politics section to find it.

The Times finally called Arizona and Georgia for Biden this week, in spite of a recount underway in Georgia, and went ahead and declared North Carolina for Trump.

So here is our final map. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, exactly the margin Trump called a “landslide” 2016. It may not be a landslide in historical terms, but it is decisive enough for government work.

Yes, on Saturday, a bunch of redneck Trump supporters not wearing masks showed up in Washington, D.C. to mount a show of a protest to keep Trump in office. Trump celebrated that on Twitter and waved at them as his motorcade drove by — on the way to his golf course in Virginia. Counter-protesters showed up too, and there were some clashes and a few arrests.

But this all seems like anti-climax to the Trump White House reality show, which was effectively canceled by 78.6 million votes for Biden (51%) to 73.1 million votes for Trump (47%), according to the final unofficial results. By law, the final official votes from each state must be turned in for official certification by Dec. 8.

In analyzing these final unofficial results, it becomes obvious that Trump did better than expected, and did get a last minute stealth bump on Election Day. The final polls had Biden winning with 52 percent of the national popular vote and Trump somewhere around 43-44 percent.

We had reported that the Republicans were registering more new voters than Democrats in the weeks leading up to the election, and that there could be a 2 percent bump for Trump by voters who lie to pollsters or refuse to answer the phone and talk to them. While that was figured into the models this time around in an attempt to prevent the problem of mis-calling the election like what happened in 2016, it looks like that bump was more like 3-4 percent this time around, confounding the modeling.

But the overall projection still ended up being accurate, in that Biden did come out ahead in popular votes and electoral college votes, and he is no minority president like Trump. He won more than half the votes, a clear majority.

His ardent supporters can kick, scream and fly their Trump and Confederate flags all they want. It is not going to change the outcome now. It’s over. Get over it. Trump is a loser!

In spite of all the noise and chatter to the contrary, and Trump’s claims of voter fraud, election officials in state after state, including Republicans in red states, have said there is no evidence of fraud. In fact, this may go down in history as one of the most effective and honest elections ever due to all the advance work in the time of COVID and expectations of problems talked about at length before the election.

Also so far, there is no evidence any judge or court is prepared to side with Trump in overturning the reported outcome of this election. Trump’s lawyers are losing every case they bring in state and federal courts and so far the U.S. Supreme Court has turned down and refused to hear any appeals of those rulings.

As I have said all along, in spite of the fear of a repeat of 2000 when the high court stopped the recount in Florida and gave Bush the win over Gore, no real judge agrees with Trump. Even if he appointed them to a lifetime on the court, like many presidents have found out over the decades, real judges are never going to go along with Trump’s corruption of the law.

So get some rest and stay safe from the coronavirus. Wear a mask in public. Use hand sanitizer. Stay home and away from other people as much as you can. It’s going to be a long winter of waiting for a COVID vaccine.