Vote suppression is not some urban myth, and it's been going on for decades. Read Palast. Better yet, listen to him on Rob Kall's podcast.
We've been fed this nonsense about how "the country's divided" for so long we began to believe it was this country they were talking about. But it was really some sub-demographic, some bubble, that cancels itself out every election, but sucks up all the oxygen, so we don't ever talk about the rest of us.
The rest of us, the targets of massive, heavily-funded, state-by-state voter suppression, voted anyway this time around. We did it by proxy, when thousands or millions of our peers, who had not voted before, voted for us. They probably didn't know they were voting for us, but since so many had been taken out of the game, they carried the day by a whisker.
If over a million voters were summarily purged from the rolls, and never got to vote, never mind the dozen other underhanded methods, that's a landslide. You just can't see it, because we had to make up for all those purged voters.
If all that phony-legal stuff, like what Kemp did to Stacy Abrams in Georgia, had not happened (like, if there was a functioning Justice Department and Judiciary), the pundits would be singing a different song. With a lot of words like "tsunami" and "rout" and "no contest" and "hands down" in the lyrics.
I don't want to get too excited about this triumph of American democracy: the landslide we got is clearly attributable to the repulsiveness and dishonesty of the incumbent, much more than the sterling qualities of the other candidate. And the machinations of the Dems, who did all kinds of vile tricks to dump Asians and other ethnic groups off the voter rolls when Bernie was a contender.
Watch now, as the talking heads spin us a tale of a photo-finsh, how Biden pulled it out of a hat in the nick of time, it could have gone either way, and now, half the country is ready to go to war against the other half.
They will do this, compelled by the logic of media economics, which absolutely requires a horse-race, a play-off, a world-series, knock-down, drag-out fight (with good people on both sides). Without that, the media conglomerates that extract and exploit our attention so relentlessly would go bankrupt. We would get over it; but nobody's asking us.
It's a bubble, a closed circuit, a self-referential calculation. A self-licking ice-cream cone. The people listen to the media, and the media read the polls, and the polls read the people, and around and around and around we go, in an accelerating spiral of meaninglessness.
But it won't do. The math doesn't add up. It's not a divided country. Half the people are not followers of a despotic psychopath, just half the fraction of the people permitted to vote. The media are complicit in this nasty game. The opposing camps cancel each other out, and a small percentage is left to decide the winner, which does not indicate anything about the mood, much less the will, of the people. Why should this system even exist, when it is so irrelevant to democracy? Well, since you ask, because it is so irrelevant to democracy, that's why.
It would a piece of technological cake, by the way, to sample the real wants and needs of everyone on Earth. Bucky Fuller suggested this back in the 1970s. I was there. He suggested calibrating the satellite opinion-reader by broadcasting something, and then reading the temperature of the surface of the planet. Very soon, we could correlate the findings with human responses, and bingo! Instant universal democracy.
Amazon already does that, and a dozen other mega-corps, and their pilot-fish. But they do that to extract value, not to provide it. But if that were to happen with elections, the actual American demographics, you know, like the census that would be counted if undocumented people dared to answer the door, would be let loose on the American political system.
And that would be a landslide.
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