Prior to Election Day 2020, the most credible pollsters (yes, there are a few) had Joe Biden emerging victorious in the presidential race. The prevailing opinion had Biden attaining 290 electoral votes to 248 for President Trump. As we now know, Biden did win with the only error among said pollsters being Trump winning the 16 electoral votes in Georgia.
As it turns out, the Trump team's internal polling basically said the same thing. And even though results bore that out, Team Trump chose to push fantastical conspiracy theories about the vote being stolen in key swing states.
Former White House communications director Alyssa Farah, in an interview with Politico, finally decided to give her perspective.
So I made the decision back in December to step down because, well, first and foremost, going back to the day after Election Day, I was scheduled to go on TV and was prepared to deliver a message that I was proud of, which is: It looks like we lost, but Republicans were able to turn out record Hispanic support, record African American support. And we helped get a record number of women elected to the House of Representatives.
But I was advised by the campaign to stand down. That wouldn’t be the message. We weren’t going to be acknowledging the loss, and they were going to pursue avenues to reconcile that. And I’m of the mind that it’s foundational to our democracy that if you think there was fraud or irregularities, the president absolutely should pursue legal recourse to determine if there was. But we’re now at a point where we’ve seen something like 60 cases, and conservative judges ruling against them. And there just has not been compelling evidence of anything to show that the election went any way different than it did.
And I’m someone who worked on the Hill for half a decade prior to going into the administration. And, you know, I've always advocated for voter ID. I think we have to have a smart policy discussion about where to go from here to avoid the potential issues of fraud. But we need to come to grips with the fact Republicans lost the election.
So, long answer short: I made the decision to step down in December because I saw where this was heading, and I wasn’t comfortable being a part of sharing this message to the public that the election results might go a different way. I didn’t see that to be where the facts lay.
So to me, it was time. And then Wednesday was really a boiling point showing that misleading the public has consequences. And what happened was unacceptable. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. And I certainly fault the protesters—frankly, we should call them terrorists, but I fundamentally fault our elected leadership who allowed these people to believe that their election was stolen from them. The president and certain advisers around him are directly responsible.
Had Trump conceded the week of Election Day, all of the focus would have then been shifted to January's two U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia. The incumbent GOP Senators would have likely prevailed as a result, thus maintaining a Republican majority in that body and effectively neutering any of Joe Biden's agenda. And since the GOP significantly narrowed the Dem majority in the U.S. House, the 2022 midterms were looking good for the party with a legit shot to control all of Congress.
Now?
Party that's divided is the one that's losing.
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) January 9, 2021
21 House Rs in the 40 most competitive districts = voted with Trump
19 House Rs in the 40 most competitive CDs = voted for democracy
Suggests vacuum of leadership.https://t.co/olV0Hyf2ap
Trump's mantra during his 4-year term was to "Drain the Swap" in Washington, D.C. However, because of the actions of Trump himself as well as his most ardent supporters, D.C. is shaping up to become even more "swampy." And Team Trump has no one but themselves to blame for it.
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