As Republicans seek to show their fealty to Donald Trump in the expectation he will soon be gone, they are mortgaging their immediate futures to him, as I observed at New York:

The MAGA rank and file whose main sources of information are limited to Donald Trump, his allies, and hyperpartisan pro-Trump media may truly believe the lies he is telling about what happened in the 2020 election. But the big scandal is that pro-Trump elites who assuredly know better are buying into the misinformation campaign as well. It’s not easy to identify a universal motivation for their complicity in duplicity. It could be a mixture of loyalty and cowardice, or sheer partisanship, or ideological consanguinity.

But no matter what their motives are, they will all soon have a common problem: how to treat the 45th president when he finally does move out of the White House, having failed to talk state legislators, military leaders, or the populace into stealing a second term for him.

They would be wise to proceed cautiously. This isn’t just a matter of 2024 presidential-nomination politics, although this mass obedience to Trump (conspicuously present among Republican pols who might otherwise be planning campaigns of their own) does keep any potential rivals or successors from moving forward. Even if Trump ultimately decides not to make a formal comeback bid, he has all the time in the world to fish or cut bait. But meanwhile, he will be like the hound of the Baskervilles, howling in the near distance and occasionally sniffing at the front door of every Republican gathering.

Mulling Trump’s prospective status in an interview with Peter Nicholas, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham (who once said of Trump, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office”) uttered words that may have been prophetic while carefully stipulating that Trump hasn’t lost just yet:

“He has a lot of sway over the Republican Party. If he objects to anything Biden [does], it would be hard to get Republicans on board. If he blessed some kind of deal, it would be easier to get something done. In many ways, he’ll be a shadow president.”

The notion of a “shadow” opposition leader, common in parliamentary systems, has never had any place in the United States, where defeated presidents (or presidential candidates) have no office to fall back upon and no formal status. On January 21, Trump will be a private citizen, albeit one with a Secret Service detail. If the idea spreads in Republican circles that Trump deserves quasi-official status as the victim of a “stolen election,” it could make him the most powerful ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt (or maybe more powerful, since Teddy had to cede party leadership to a designated successor).

Those Republicans who have privately hoped to rid themselves of Trump by jollying him along in his postelection misconduct really need to rethink their strategy. The only thing worse for them than a 2024 Trump comeback effort is a scenario in which he never goes away at all.

A lot of people have understandably stopped watching election returns trickle in. But they matter, as I explained at New York:

As Donald Trump continues to complain that he actually won, Joe Biden’s popular vote lead over the 45th president keeps growing to more and more impressive levels. He and Kamala Harris now have won more than 81 million votes, or over 10 million more than Barack Obama and Biden won in 2008, the previous high-water mark.

On Thursday, Biden’s popular vote margin over Trump passed the 7 million vote mark, well over twice the 2.9 million margin won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. From a percentage point of view, Biden leads by 4.4 percent — again, well over twice the 2.1 percent margin won by Clinton over Trump four years ago, and also more than the 3.9 percent by which Obama and Biden defeated Mitt Romney in 2012. It’s also higher than the popular vote percentage margins of the winners in 2004, 2000, 1976, 1968, and 1960. 2020 was by no means a landslide, of course, but from a popular-vote perspective it was the next best thing.

The Biden-Harris ticket’s 51.3 percent of the popular vote is pretty impressive, too. It’s higher than the 51.1 percent he and Obama won in 2012, and with the exception of the 52.9 percent they won in 2008, it’s the highest for any Democratic presidential ticket dating all the way back to Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 (and before that, you have to go back to FDR in 1944 to find its equal).

If we didn’t have the abomination of the Electoral College, the Biden-Harris win would have looked comfortable, not uncomfortably close. Democrats should enjoy it a bit more than they have, and focus on hoping that Georgia will not only give Biden’s party its 16 electoral votes on December 14 when they are finally cast, but also control of the Senate if Democrats win two runoffs on January 5.

If that happens, many of the frowns over disappointing down-ballot results will turn to smiles.

For months I was one of a number of political observers warning that Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a coup to overturn an election loss. Yet he is very close to the exit ramp from the White House. I examined what happened to his plans at New York:

State election-results certifications are rolling in for Biden; federal and state judicial panels are monotonously rejecting his legal challenges to the results; and the number of Republican elected officials supporting the conspiracy theories his lawyers are offering is eroding steadily. Now that the threat of a seriously contested (or even overturned) presidential election is receding (though not entirely disappearing), it’s worth asking why it went down as it did. As someone who feared a “red mirage” scenario, in which the president would tally an early Election Night lead then prematurely declare victory, I feel a responsibility to examine what went wrong for Trump, and right for democracy. Below are some possible explanations for his failure to mount a serious challenge to his defeat.

Maybe Trump Never Had an Actual Plan

Back in the spring and summer of this year, when Trump began attacking voting by mail as inherently corrupt, it began to occur to many of us that in convincing Republicans to vote on Election Day he might be trying to engineer a scenario in which he would gain a temporary lead from in-person results, then attempt to disallow the mail ballots that would swing the election to Biden days or even weeks after November 3. Critics of “red mirage” talk often dismissed such fears as overestimating Trump’s seriousness, not to mention his ability to convince others to go along with any effort to stop the counting of mail ballots on or after Election Day.

Perhaps these critics were right: Trump’s “plan” to steal the election failed because there was never really a plan beyond throwing mud at the election process and hoping something stuck. That interpretation would explain the Trump campaign’s erratic postelection legal strategy, and its too little, too late efforts to mobilize the president’s supporters to put pressure on election officials and state legislators to skew the vote or set it aside in favor of arbitrarily appointed Trump electors. In other words, if there was a plan, it was incompetently executed.

Perhaps Trump Hesitated When It Looked Like He Could Win Legitimately

Another possibility is that Trump was doing well enough in the initial returns that he hesitated in contesting the election, as there was a real possibility he could win without chicanery. He won Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas decisively, and was obviously in a competitive position in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. When it became obvious that later mail ballots were going to resolve the results in the closest states, early on November 4, Trump did make his long-expected victory claim, and vaguely threatened legal action to stop the counting of “illegal” votes. But it was not the clarion call for revolution many of us feared, as I noted at the time in trying to parse his wee-hours remarks in the East Room:

“This is all guesswork, beyond the president’s clear indication that he doesn’t want to allow all legal votes to be counted and reported, on the specious grounds that a ballot postmarked by Election Day is somehow cast afterward. I suppose it’s a small victory that he’s talking about going to court rather than inciting violence or using his own powers to suppress vote-counting by brute force.”

There was something irresolute about Trump’s victory claims and his failure to call his supporters into the streets that suggested either divisions among his team or perhaps doubt as to whether Biden would win without court interventions. It’s useful to remember that the experts didn’t actually call the election for Biden until November 7. So pulling the trigger on a full-on election contest might have seemed risky at that point.

Trump’s Legal Strategy Turned Out to Be a Blind Alley

Reflecting what probably seemed like the imperative of securing small changes in the results from very close states, Team Trump’s initial legal strategy seemed focused on very narrow issues — particularly a continuation of Republicans’ national and state preelection lawsuits that aimed to stop the extension of mail-ballot deadlines (a particularly big issue in North Carolina and Pennsylvania). Here’s how I summarized the situation in all-important Pennsylvania as of November 9:

“Election-law expert Rick Hasen estimates that about 10,000 total votes were received between November 3 and November 6, and some of them, of course, were cast for Donald Trump. At the moment, Biden’s lead in the Keystone State stands at 45,000. And even if Trump could somehow flip (or call into question) Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes, he’d need to win 36 additional EVs from the 45 still unresolved (26 of them in states where Biden currently leads) to reverse the overall outcome. To sum it all up: If he had some ham, he could make a ham sandwich, if he had some bread.”

Again, it was too little, too late.

Trump Never Mobilized Republican State Legislators to Save Him

However you analyze the path that brought Trump to the situation where his lawyers resorted to wild conspiracy theories (as reflected in the insane presser they held on November 19) and frantic efforts to slow down state certifications of results, it was obvious by mid-November that Trump’s only hope was to create enough phony doubt about the outcome in key states to justify a power grab by Republican legislators. The idea, which was fully aired in many of the preelection “red mirage” speculations (I wrote about it in April), was that state legislators would assert a constitutionally sanctioned (if controversial and arguably in conflict with their own statutes) right to appoint electors themselves since “fraud” had tainted the popular-vote results. Trump publicly called on GOP legislators to do just that, as Politico reported on November 21:

“[W]ith few cases pending in courts, Trump’s options have narrowed and he is becoming increasingly reliant on longshot scenarios where election results are not certified and Republican-controlled statehouses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia intervene to declare him the winner.

“GOP legislative leaders in those states have not endorsed this approach. Trump summoned Michigan legislative leaders to the White House on Friday, but they later issued a statement indicating they had not seen any reason to intervene on Trump’s behalf.”

For this long-shot strategy to have worked, Trump would have needed to begin much earlier — perhaps in close coordination with his early and incessant attacks on voting by mail — to prepare Republican legislators for this audacious step, while mobilizing tens of thousands of MAGA bravos to surround state capitols and demand an intervention to stop Biden’s alleged theft of the election. Clearly none of that groundwork was done in advance, and when the time came for Trump to call on Republican legislators to save his bacon, they appeared sympathetic but unwilling to violate their own laws and procedures to overturn popular-vote results. Conservative opinion leaders were at best divided on such desperate measures, too. So as my colleague Jonathan Chait pointed out, a coup didn’t have the united party support required to make it work:

“Trump’s attempted coup is going to fail because he hasn’t gotten the party fully onboard with it. It’s not hard for them to say no: Trump didn’t even begin to organize his scheme until it was too late, he has too many states to flip, and the alternative facing them — a moderate Democrat constrained by a right-wing court and a likely Republican Senate — is hardly scary …

“The popular Republican stance has been to indulge Trump’s lies while dismissing the danger he poses. ‘To launch a coup you need more than a giant, suppurating grievance and access to Twitter,’ Wall Street Journal opinion columnist and former editor Gerard Baker scoffs. ‘You need a fanatical commitment, a detailed plan, an energy, a sophisticated apparatus of revolution.'”

We may have to wait until memoirs are written or Trumpian tongues are otherwise loosened to find out whether a seriously contested election was ever in the works, or if the whole “red mirage” scare was just another by-product of a president with no respect for norms and the power to order his troops to break them — though not enough of them, and not quickly or efficiently enough.

After reading a lot of stuff about ticket-splitting damaging Democrats down-ballot, I stared at the data and pushed back a bit at New York:

Sometimes it’s easy to get tangled up in the terminology of winning and losing in elections. Joe Biden clearly won the presidency, albeit by smaller margins than most observers expected. But unless Democrats sweep the two January runoffs in Georgia, they will have lost the battle for control of the Senate. And Democrats definitely lost at least ten net House seats. That said, Democrats did maintain control of the House, and, for that matter, posted a net gain of at least one Senate seat.

Still, the perception that Biden won but the party “lost” might have created an exaggerated impression that ticket splitting made a big comeback in 2020. Yes, there are a few clear examples of Republicans doing well in places where Trump didn’t do quite so well. Senator Susan Collins ran seven points ahead of the president in Maine. There were a smattering of suburban House Republican congressional candidates, notably in California and Texas, who appear to have overcome Trump’s losses in their district to post wins. But let’s not overthink this and engage in grand narratives of this or that “wing” of the party damaging their caucus in the House or of Republicans shrewdly distancing themselves from Trump (most didn’t) and/or convincing swing voters they would serve as a counterweight to President Biden.

For the most part, this was a straight-ticket election in which the results tracked as what you would expect from a competitive presidential contest. Biden’s lead over Trump in the national popular vote currently stands at 4 percent. Collins was the only Senate candidate to win a state lost by her party’s presidential nominee (again, pending the Georgia runoffs). And the national House popular vote gave Democrats 50.5 percent and Republicans 48.1 percent, which is actually quite close to the presidential breakdown of 51.1 percent for Biden and 47.1 percent for Trump. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein estimates that Biden won 223 House districts (compared to 209 for Obama in 2012 and 205 for Clinton in 2016). This year, Democrats won 222 House seats with three races still undecided. It’s all fairly cut-and-dried, at least from a national perspective.

It’s true, as Brownstein reminds us, that House Democrats suffer from a less efficient distribution of voters than Republicans, which keeps their share of districts from perfectly representing the national popular vote.

“’If you apportion the House in a fair drawing, it favors Republicans, because Democrats live in these urban enclaves that are 80 percent [Democratic] and they waste a lot of votes,’ Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me.”

But again, it’s possible to exaggerate the importance of structural issues. 50.5 percent of 435 House seats is 220. Democrats aren’t really punching below their weight.

This country is still divided almost evenly between two increasingly polarized major parties. All the insane events of 2020, underlaid by Trump’s uniquely divisive presidency, didn’t change that. A lot of unexpected things happened on the margins, but for the most part this election was a reversion to the mean after a fairly standard midterm reaction to the party controlling the White House. Certainly, there are very important consequences that will flow from small variations to the general pattern of partisan voting, particularly in the closely divided Senate. And without question, Democrats will pay a large cost for failing to win big across the board, particularly when redistricting arrives next year and Republican control of all those state legislative chambers that was at risk this year gives the GOP an advantage in drawing new districts for the next decade. Overall, though, the partisan and ideological gridlock that sometimes feels like the 21st century’s natural state remains firmly intact.

This may wind up being an ephemeral event on the road to Joe Biden’s inauguration, but it should stand in infamy, as I explained at New York:

When the Trump campaign announced a noon press conference today, there was some speculation that it might signal an end to the president’s doomed effort to challenge his election defeat. That might have seemed rational, since Team Trump and its subordinate allies have again and again struck out in court, all over the country, in efforts to even raise the remote possibility there was enough “fraud” to change the outcome. And with state certifications of the results on the very near horizon, there’s no question Republicans were privately whispering to the president and his staff that it was time to end the circus and move along.

Lord have mercy, was the end-is-coming speculation wrong! In an interminable press conference, Trump’s legal team upped the ante by about a million percent, alleging a massive national conspiracy personally directed by Joe Biden, but bankrolled by “communist money,” to steal an election that “the president clearly won by a landslide,” as Trump attorney Sidney Powell said at one point. Chief lawyer Rudy Giuliani became more and more agitated as the strange event went on, spending most of his time attacking reporters from the “fake media” in the room and symbolizing the heat of his words when his hair-dye melted, leaving brown streaks down each side of his face.

But the longer the presser went on, the more it became clear that the Trump campaign was relying not so much on affidavits of misconduct or statistical demonstrations of altered results but rather the broadest sorts of conspiracy theories, most of them inherently absurd or previously exploded. Giuliani repeatedly spoke of mail ballots as though they are some sort of sinister new invention rather than a method of voting that has been available in one form or another in every state for years. He also with a straight face argued that the reversal of early Trump leads in many states as mail ballots were counted was prima facie evidence of fraud, rather than a reflection of his own client’s loud, constant, and successful efforts to convince Republicans not to vote by mail – and of Republican legislators’ decision to ban the counting of mail ballots until Election Day or immediately before it.

In other words, having failed to supply evidence of wrongdoing sufficient to change the results in individual states, Team Trump has headed into the murky and dangerous territory of declaring the entire election illegitimate, from sea to shining sea.

This became plain when Sidney Powell took the presser far down the rabbit hole into discredited claims that voting machines designed in Venezuela had systematically miscounted the vote in order to throw the election to Biden. Weeping actual tears, Powell spoke darkly of “communist money” and veered off into murky claims from years far past. I wasn’t the only one who struggled to follow her: “Even by the standards of the Trump legal team, Sidney Powell is making no sense right now. You have to be just mainlining http://TheDonald.win and Gateway Pundit to have any idea what she’s referencing,” observed the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer.

Other than lashing the media for failing to “cover” its incoherent theories and alerting the president’s supporters that the fight was by no means winding down, what was the point of the presser? It appears that the lawsuits Giuliani threatened will seek to get judges to stop state certification of results. Since they will probably not gain any more traction than earlier campaign or GOP efforts to slow down the process, the real goal was probably indicated by Ellis and Powell, both of whom mentioned “constitutional provisions” for “fixing” a rigged election. By that I am assuming they meant the questionable theory that state legislatures can put aside “disputed” results and just appoint electors on their own.

It’s no coincidence that the legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are controlled by Trump’s GOP. And worried observers have long feared Trump had in mind exactly this sort of end-run of the results if he lost. Based on the overall impression left by Trump’s team after this stunning event, it’s reasonably clear the strategy is to get the MAGA masses to press Republican legislators in the key states to steal the 2020 election on grounds that it was earlier stolen by Democrats.

I’ve been watching political developments closely for a half-century, and have witnessed all sorts of craziness. But the spectacle of the president’s lawyers menacing reporters (“You’re lying! You’re lying! You’re lying!” Giuliani screamed at one reporter trying to ask a question, after asking her “What fake media do you work for?”) trying to unravel their wild claims was something out of a bad alternative history where the bad guys won World War II. At one point, Powell said: “This is the 1775 of our generation and beyond!” Are these people threatening violent revolution if they don’t get their way? Normally I’d say, “Of course not!” But for the first time, I’m really not sure.