By Chris Satullo

National elections are huge, confusing, consequential, emotional events that happen in real time, as millions of conflicting data points cascade in. Even before the polls close in Western time zones, the rush to make sense of this surfeit, to craft narratives that Explain It All, begins.

The 2020 election was more confusing and consequential than most, a visceral roller-coaster.  So it has already spawned an array of competing narratives.

Unfortunately, right now, one particular narrative is the one sucking up the most air and muddling the judgment of millions:

Donald Trump in truth won in a landslide but a shadowy, double-helix conspiracy of dastardly, dark-skinned Dems, haughty High Tech hit-men and socialist foreigners stole the election from our hero.

This story line is, I hope you’re aware, utterly without factual basis as well as…what’s the precise phrase I’m looking for?…Ah yes, here it is…batshit crazy.

Yet it’s believed, if you credit recent polls, by something like 55 million Americans.

If you happen to run into one of these folks who haunt the fever swamps of Parler and Newsmax, beg them to read just this one piece of lucid, well-sourced journalism from Tim Alberta of Politico. Detailing the gap between The Donald’s lying tweets and what really happened at the polls in places such as Michigan, Alberta performs noble service to the cause of restoring sanity to the Republic. If only those 55 million would read and believe him. If only.

Still, it’s not just in MAGA-Land where we see a rush to overinterpret or misinterpret data in line with emotions or preconceptions. (I don’t exclude myself from this carnival of confirmation bias. With an election this momentous, emotions this raw, it can be hard to maintain rigor in sifting analysis from bias, data from desire.)

Some Biden backers (raises hand) spent October reading happy polls and dreaming of an Election Night bloodbath for Trump and the GOP, a no-doubt Electoral College landslide, an utter repudiation of 45’s legion of congressional enablers.

But come the evening of Nov. 3, it all felt much more like a bewildering replay of the 2016 nightmare than an orgiastic triumph. Even as Election Night turned into Election Week and Dems nervously let Khaki Steve Kornacki’s index finger guide them to a pale version of the promised land – a tense Biden win coupled with down-ballot carnage – two concerns formed:

1. Somebody on the blue team had to be to blame for the seeming narrowness of Biden’s win and the endurance of Mitch McConnell’s majority. 
2. The polls, the goddamned polls, had once again been wildly, tragically wrong. They’d predicted a Biden romp and instead the nation had to endure a nail-biter.

In response to Concern 1, it took about 3 seconds for coastal progressives and heartland moderates to muster into a circular firing squad. Progressives blamed Biden and party leaders for preferring to peddle mush to moderates, instead of shouting the left’s bold ideas from the rooftops. The moderates fired back that slogans like Defund the Police and Green New Deal were millstones around the necks of failed Democratic Senate and House candidates across the land.

In my last outing, I laid out my reasons for favoring the moderates’ take. Let me add just one observation: This election played out differently in different regions and metro areas. Still,  when you dig into the data, it seems often true that in places where hyped Democratic Senate hopefuls lost (e.g. Maine, North Carolina, Texas), Biden ran ahead of his down-ballot partners.

This suggests that, in those places, a decisive sliver of independents and RINOs voted for Biden as a repudiation of Trump, then chose red in other races to keep wild-eyed “socialists” from gaining a Capitol Hill majority.

On to Concern 2. Did the pollsters miss the mark again? Yep, but just as in 2016, not to the vast degree a fast-forming narrative claims. Look at this “consensus” map of what the polls were saying published by the respected 270toWin website the morning of the election (brown signals tossup):

Pretty on the nose, eh? The polling miss came down to this: Trump was way stronger in the upper Midwest and Florida than the polls caught.

The truth about the polling misses should matter to more than just Nate Silver stans like me. Flawed narratives about what went down in one election produce flawed assumptions and strategy in the next campaign.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by way more than most people recall, because much of the margin trickled in from tardy West Coast states and New York, days after the networks had called it. The final numbers couldn’t be heard amid the blue gnashing of teeth and the red gloating.

Trump won by a hair in ’16 because, in the decisive Midwest states (WI, MI and PA), he lured to the polls whites who hadn’t voted for anyone in a long time and were missed by pollsters. Meanwhile Hillary lagged with suburban women. Trump also did much better with Latinos, Blacks and Asian-Americans than that lazy generalization “people of color” ever can imagine.

Trump did all of that, even better, this time. Only this time, his awfulness, combined with Uncle Joe’s comforting decency, helped the Dems do better at turning out all aspects of their base – while Biden grabbed crucial votes from the suburban contingent that, in ’16, either took a flyer on Trump or muttered a pox on both their houses.

That’s what I think I see, staring hard at the numbers. Plenty about this election still mystifies me – perhaps always will. A stunning 74 million Americans somehow thought a corrupt, racist, ignorant, reckless incompetent responsible for tens of thousands of pandemic deaths deserved four more years. And many of them still believe, against all evidence, that he won. That is as baffling as it is depressing.

But here’s what even many Americans who aren’t in thrall to Trump’s toxic fantasies don’t yet seem to get:

This was not a squeaker.

Joe Biden won this pretty easily, by any historical measure. At this writing, with some, mostly Democratic, votes still not tallied, he’s up by 6,193,968.

By the time bumbling, blue New York State finishes tallying its votes, he’ll have won by about 50 times the 112,827 margin Jack Kennedy had in 1960,  racking nearly 2.5 times the total votes that JFK got.

He’ll top Richard Nixon’s 1968 margin by more than 5.5 million votes. Those ‘60s elections really were squeakers, but does history remember those two presidents as “accidental” winners with no mandate? Surely not.

Biden, getting the most votes of any candidate ever, will have a victory margin larger than Clinton over Bush Sr. in 1992, Bush Jr. over Kerry in 2005, even Obama over Romney in 2012.

Here’s a stat that underlines the absurdity of Trump’s demand-a-recount act: Biden’s margins in Pennsylvania and Michigan are each larger than Trump’s combined margin in PA, MI and Wisconsin in 2016. Yet Hillary conceded on Election Night, with far more claim to fight on than Trump ever had.

Biden’s electoral vote total of 306 will be exactly the same as Trump’s in 2016, which the Orange One has endlessly touted as an “historic landslide.”

Why hasn’t all this sunk in for so many of us?

Well, first of all, the Gaslighter-in-Chief is doing what he does, frantically, ceaselessly scrambling our sense of reality to suit his ego needs, one last (let’s hope) time.

Also, this pandemic election, with its reliance on mail-in ballots in pivotal states where Republicans refused to let those ballots be counted expeditiously (precisely so they could trot out their fraudulent claims of fraud), produced a dramatic “Red Mirage” of seeming GOP success on Election Night.

Even though for months I’d been warning friends about the Red Mirage,  I still got sucked into the anxiety trap watching CNN that night. Even knowing rationally that those red-tinted numbers were temporary didn’t spare me from ugly bouts of 2016 PTSD.

For many, the lingering effect of this early anxiety made the election seem closer than it really was. The slow-motion unfolding of the Blue Shift over the next four days, against the backbeat of Trump’s demented victory claims, made a comfortable Biden win feel more like a Super Bowl your team won on a 55-yard field goal in double overtime. You’re thrilled, sure, but you’re drained and you don’t ever want to go through that again.

But, please, never lose sight of this:

Except for the delaying games the GOP played with the mailed ballot count in key states, Biden’s win would have felt more this: an easy win where the winning team spends the fourth quarter running out the clock, waving to the stands and preparing a Gatorade bath for the coach.

Biden won. By plenty. He has a mandate. Let him run with it.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.