Harris victory would have spawned a one-party central government

OPINION:

Last Tuesday felt a lot like 2020, when counting stopped in the wee hours and Democratic nominee Joe Biden pulled miraculously ahead.

By midnight this time, only North Carolina had been called for Republican Donald Trump, and the other six battleground states were too early to call. What? The rest of the country’s vote had pretty much been counted.

Despite the dread, there was a palpable feeling that things would be different, that this election would be, as Mr. Trump exhorted, “too big to rig.” And it was.

While scrolling X, I came across a brigade of marching squirrels decked out in MAGA hats in homage to Peanut. He is the adopted squirrel in New York state who was seized and euthanized by state wildlife officials for no good reason.

The send-up was hilarious. But like The Babylon Bee’s matchless satire, it made a serious point about government overreach and Mr. Trump’s appeal.

Many Americans are appalled by the Obama-Biden-Harris authoritarian agenda, such as pushing to ban gasoline-powered vehicles and forcing people to buy electric cars and trucks. The cost of this just for 18-wheelers, which haul goods nationwide, is absurd.

People are tired of being lied to by Democrats and a servile media that help them advance insane policies and covers up the damage.

No, voters said, inflation is not fine now. No, boys can’t turn into girls. No, transgender athletes should not compete against girls and women. No, Vice President Kamala Harris is not tough on border security.

No, crime is not down. No, America is not an evil nation that must be torn down and rebuilt. No, Mr. Trump is not Hitler. No, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is not Mussolini. No, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz won’t be mistaken for Chuck Norris.

Mr. Trump’s stint working the drive-thru window at McDonald’s and his arrival at a rally in the cab of a garbage truck shattered the left’s vilification of him as an evil dictator. He made it clear he sided with those that President Biden called “garbage” and against the ruling elites.

Democrats were obsessed with abortion, even though polls showed it far down the list of top issues.

Nearly every Democrat made abortion the centerpiece in their campaigns, plus they cast Trump as a threat to end “democracy.”

It did work in some places, such as deep blue Maryland, where the winning Senate candidate, Angela Alsobrooks, pounded former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan over abortion and Mr. Trump. Mr. Hogan lost even though he dissed Mr. Trump and knelt at the altar of Molech.

Nationally, abortion didn’t prove decisive. Republicans comfortably captured the White House, at least 53 Senate seats and probably retained the House.

Although turnout figures seem elusive, it’s a good bet that Christians voted in record numbers. Catholics picked Mr. Trump by a nearly 20-point margin after backing Mr. Biden in 2020. Six in 10 Protestants supported Mr. Trump, including 80% of White evangelicals, a 4-point increase.

Mr. Trump’s support of Israel increased his Jewish vote to 32% overall and to nearly half in New York.

Minorities voted in record numbers for Mr. Trump and Republicans. Mr. Trump carried 54% of Hispanic men and 46% of the Hispanic vote overall.

Although former President Barack Obama accused Black men of misogyny if they didn’t vote for Ms. Harris, young Black men doubled their support for Mr. Trump, including 5-point increases in the swing states of Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Mr. Trump lost by only 6 points among 18- to 29-year-olds, a group that Mr. Biden won by 25 points in 2020. And Mr. Trump won big — 56% to 43% — among first-time voters, a reversal of 2020.

Even the kids are fed up with inflation and they/them cancel culture.

Another huge factor was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. For years, leftist Twitter employees routinely censored content. Mr. Musk, who donated at least $120 million to the Trump campaign and revamped the social media platform into X, an outlet for conservative voices as well as liberal ones.

Other factors:

The Trump-directed Republican National Committee dispatched hundreds of workers and lawyers to quell suspected vote fraud.

In 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg poured $400 million into Wisconsin and other battleground states so leftists could turn election offices into Democratic get-out-the-vote operations. Not this time. Mr. Zuckerburg also vowed not to allow the FBI and other federal agencies to pressure Facebook and Instagram into censoring conservatives anymore.

In Los Angeles, District Attorney George Gascon lost to tough-on-crime Nathan Hochman. Across California, Prop 36 easily passed, reversing a 2014 law that had unleashed a crime wave by downgrading felony thefts of under $950 to misdemeanors.

The stakes were, as Mr. Trump would say, “huge.”

Had Ms. Harris had won the presidency, we would have millions more illegal immigrants, looser voter ID laws, more extremely liberal judges, more green insanity, more LGBTQ mandates and more attacks on religious liberty.

This would have birthed a one-party central government in which elections were no longer meaningful.

But it didn’t happen, thanks be to God.

This is why so many people had election night jitters and why, as Psalm 30 says, “joy comes in the morning.”

Evangelist Billy Graham once wrote a devotional piece that started with this:

“Crossing the North Atlantic years ago, I looked out my porthole and saw the blackest cloud I had ever seen. Certain that we were in for a terrible storm, I asked the steward about it.

“He said, ‘Oh, we’ve already come through. The storm is behind us.’”

I was reading this on the morning after the election.

• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.