"Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman somehow contorted the mixed, and yet unresolved, 2020 election results to simultaneously claim that mandates do not really exist, but that Joe Biden nonetheless has one.
"It is important to refute this spurious claim because Biden and Kamala Harris will use any excuse they can to push a laundry list of progressive legislation and executive branch rulemaking. Americans should not allow this, especially under such a false pretense.
"In the first part of his article, Waldman claims that mandates are mostly an artificial political construct. He may be correct in this assessment, but then he states that Republicans “know that if you act like you have a mandate, then you do.” It is far more accurate to make this phrase conditional. Two things are necessary to have a mandate: the votes to push your agenda through and the political will to do so.
"The Washington Post column then lapses into a series of ill-founded assumptions and statistical half-truths seeking to provide a data-driven justification for a Biden mandate, thus marching the opposite direction of the notion that acting like you have a mandate delivers it to you.
"Firstly, there is the claim that Biden won “despite the extraordinary voter suppression effort” of Republicans. Waldman’s own publication contradicts this claim of voter suppression, reporting that the 2020 election saw at least a 63 percent turnout, a rate not seen since the 1960s. The counting process is ongoing, but if the Post is right in its estimate that final vote totals will eclipse a 66 percent turnout rate, this may end up being the election with the highest participation rate in living memory.
"Such a high turnout is a function of the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the fact that progressive and liberal causes achieved nearly everything they wanted in terms of extended early voting periods and lower-security mail-in ballot efforts. A projected 161 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, 23 million more than in 2016. Really it makes far more sense to argue that Biden won because of changes to election laws this year than it does to say he won in spite of them." . . .
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