If President Trump loses election 2020, charges that this contest was stolen will stay in the air for a long time to come.
The Republicans have already contested the Michigan results, challenging alleged ballot dumps in their hundreds of thousands late on election night.
They've filed for a recount in Wisconsin where Trump has lost by 20,000 votes as per the state election board's tally.
In Pennsylvania, they've rightly asked Governor Tom Wolf why he won't let Republican election agents near the counting stations even as he professes the intention to get even the last votes counted.
Well, these efforts may not after all help Trump retain the presidency.
That scenario exists because two more states are reportedly preparing to declare the results and Biden is a breath away from claiming a victory. With contested Michigan and Wisconsin marked in his column, a win in Nevada will see him through to the 270-mark.
Another state that could declare the result is Georgia, where, again, the race is on a razor's edge.
From that point on, it will be a protracted legal dog fight that America might see but Biden is all likely to retain the advantage of reaching 270 first.
A Trump loss scenario must be looked at and factored in. He didn't deserve to lose in the first place. And the churn his loss would create will have a long-ranging impact on the United States for the long term.
The Corrupt Bargain
For some perspective, Newt Gingrich just harked back into the defeat of Andrew Jackson in 1824. Jackson believed he had actually won the polls, the first since the implosion of the Federalist Party. The four-way race left him in the lead but the Congress chose John Quincy Adams after Henry Clay struck a deal with Adams for the position of the Secretary of State.
Jackson called it a "corrupt bargain", and his campaign in the next four years redefined American politics. He defeated Adams in the 1828 election.
Nearly 200 years later, Trump and the Republicans are decrying another corrupt bargain. It remains unclear if their charges of large-scale vote fraud are true. These are going to the courts and the legal verdict will arrive only much later. But a 'corrupt bargain' did really exist in 2020.
It's indisputable that the media, the liberal elite, the Big Tech and the Washington insiders entered into a corrupt bargain to oust Trump from power. Only look at the opinion polls. All the mainstream pollsters factually lied to the American people about a double digit lead for Biden across the span of months.
They propped up the Biden campaign with a steady flow of lies. You don't need to be a psephologist to measure the impact of these poll-lies on voters. The Biden voters got the momentum from inflated projections while Trump lost his voters.
Lies of Big Media and Big Tech
And it's not exactly the case that this election was so complicated, and every single poll got it wrong. There were outlier polls that called this election right. So it was possible to see it right. But a whole lot of them - the big media - chose to play it differently.
The biased media projected Trump as a criminal while they did not bother to put Biden under scrutiny over serious charges. And the Big Tech. They commanded the mindscape, sitting there with a filter. They controlled which side of the argument the general public got to see. From a plain Google search result to how things panned out on Twitter and Facebook, it was all too evident.
This story won't end with a Trump loss in 2020.
(The author is Managing Editor at International Business Times. Views are personal. j.jacob@ibtimes.co.in)
