The electoral reality that the media ignores

If you listen to many in the media, the election is over. There was never even a contest. President Trump was denied a second term long ago, right around the time he was getting ready to take the oath of office.

But there is another world, one that exists outside TV studios and newsrooms. It’s a scary one for people who make their living talking to cameras, so none of them ever visits willingly. It’s not on any map. The New York-to-Washington Acela express certainly doesn’t stop there. But it’s real and, for much of America’s journalist class, it’s a terrifying place. Kicking and screaming, many of them were dragged to this horrifying spot in 2016 on election night. Few made it out unharmed.

Being “wrong” is something Big Media can’t comprehend, and not in the sense that they couldn’t understand if they tried. No, the new, approved way of thinking, the “critical theory” that’s all the rage, simply doesn’t allow it. Reality isn’t objective. Anyone who thinks otherwise is oppressive. And if you feel something is true, it is. Your truth is all that matters.

So, here’s a couple of messages from what most people used to call “reality.” These things really did happen, although you never hear about them. Put them together and you see something very different from the picture the media is painting. In fact, it’s rather distressing, if you have a Sunday talk show.

Joe Biden didn’t stick around long enough to make it through the night of the New Hampshire primary. He fled for the last state that could save his campaign — South Carolina — and Granite Staters haven’t forgotten this. Kamala Harris didn’t make it to the starting line in New Hampshire that night. She was too busy counting down the days until her running-mate appointment.

The president, on the other hand, had a very different night there. No one was surprised by his victory in the Republican primary. But not since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign had the race been decided by such a large margin. No other incumbent president, including Reagan, had ever received as many votes — more than twice the number Biden got while trying to forget New Hampshire ever existed.

Every candidate that President Trump picked for the House and Senate primaries won. From February to now, there’s been no deviation in the state party’s unity behind Trump. Not to mention that the Republican governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, remains extremely popular. You’ll be hard pressed to find somebody in New Hampshire politics who doesn’t think he’s on an easy path to reelection.

With New Hampshire joining the ranks of every other state in the union in ensuring that only state residents get to cast ballots in New Hampshire, the people of New Hampshire know that, in 2020, the tally at the end of the night is theirs and theirs alone.

This is a state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by 2,736 votes — about 0.3 percent. From Democratic apathy to Republican enthusiasm, there are a lot of solid indicators that the president can overcome this narrow deficit on Nov. 3 and add New Hampshire’s four electoral votes to his side of the Electoral College tally.

But it’s not just New Hampshire where we’re seeing these signs.

John McCain lost Minnesota by more than 10 percent in 2008. Mitt Romney lost by a little over 7 percent in 2012. In 2016, Donald Trump lost the state by just 1.5 percent.

Minnesota has been trending red for well over a decade. Mind you, the last time a Republican presidential candidate won the state, his name was Richard Nixon; it’s been as reliably blue as any state could be in the modern era. But after years of policies intended to hollow out our manufacturing base and become reliant on the rest of the world, the miners, farmers, laborers and manufacturers in the Land of 10,000 Lakes have shifted dramatically toward the party that works for their economic security. 

Don’t think Nevada is much further out of reach. Just 27,000 votes, out of more than 1 million cast, handed the state to Hillary Clinton in 2016. As Nevada’s governor now keeps the state closed to a point that rivals the East Coast suite of dictators, he sees no irony in the fact that he provided legal support to the thousands assembling in violation of health officials’ social-distancing protocols in June but then rejected the Trump campaign’s multiple requests to use outdoor sites for a recent rally there.

The media will never say this, but if you look outside their narrative, just for a moment, there’s only one conclusion: Donald Trump has put new states in play for himself and for other Republican candidates on November’s ballots.

The media can ignore all of this, and many of them will; that’s just par for the course. But if 2016 taught us anything at all, it’s probably this: Ignoring reality is a choice — but ignoring the consequences of ignoring reality is impossible.

Corey R. Lewandowski is President Trump’s former campaign manager and a senior adviser to the Trump-Pence 2020 campaign. He is a senior adviser to the Great America Committee, Vice President Mike Pence‘s political action committee. He is co-author with David Bossie of the books “Trump’s Enemies” and “Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency.” Follow him on Twitter @CLewandowski_.