It was close. Damn close. Much closer than the pundits thought it would be – or at least, said out loud in public that it would be. I’ve been taking a look at the differences between 2016 and 2020 and – aside from our world being turned upside down this past year – I think we have some important takeaways we can use.

First of all, in 2016 Donald Trump was a surprise. A genuine political outsider who used his “Reality TV” fame to get noticed. He came out of left field and caught the entire Republican Party flat-footed and a mile out of position, which they were never able to recover from. The Trump Train flattened the career politicians, seasoned campaigners all, and however improbably captured the Republican nomination.

This was not according to plan, I’m pretty certain. The RNC will have already chosen their candidate but were simply unable to stop the grassroots swell behind Trump.

And contrary to some opinions, that grassroots swell wasn’t rooted in anything except a disgust of political “business as usual.” Trump campaigned as an outsider, and that’s what appealed to the voters. He was combative and unapologetic about it, speaking to the lowest common denominator, promising change. It worked. Yes, I do discount racism as a cause for his nomination and eventual election, since white supremacists do not have sufficient numbers to actually decide national elections, and have always supported the most conservative candidates, ever since Southern Democrats created the Ku Klux Klan and built monuments to the Confederacy slave state.

His chosen opponent, however, was an insider and had been for most of her adult life. She was – and is – the embodiment of political “business as usual.” And, don’t forget that the DNC had to cheat to secure her the nomination (over a septuagenarian communist), using tactics identical to those they venomously accuse Republicans of using in 2020. The term “hypocrisy” is unknown in American politics.

And then, as they went head-to-head, her handlers made a fatal mistake by making her campaign all about Donald Trump.

We know the outcome; a painfully close election, an Electoral College victory with a narrow popular-vote loss, and Donald Trump became our 45^th President.

An aside, for a moment, about the Electoral College. While it has had its faults over the last 200-some years, the Electoral College has a specific purpose in the selection of the President. According to the Constitution, the President is elected by the states; it is more of an administrative position than a representative position. The Electoral College is there to insure that no concentrated population could dictate who our President would be, it was to be spread across the states; similar in process to the Senate, where each state’s 2 Senators represent the state as an entity, while the House of Representatives represents the people. So if the Presidency is ever decided by popular vote, it will mean that the three or four largest population centers of the US – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles – will decide who holds that office, and will make the rest of us irrelevant. So if you’re comfortable with that idea, campaign to change the system. I’m not that willing to be made redundant.

Anyway, four years later we have an incumbent President running for reelection whose accomplishments are ignored and his faults and failures amplified by a press more interested in sensationalism than informing the public. But “journalism” in this country died a long time ago…

As 2020 progressed, we find many of the same situations we saw in 2016; the respective “National Committees” picked their candidate, went through the whole “Primary” circus (well, the DNC did, the RNC went all-in on Trump, canceled all their Primary elections and didn’t even bother to update the platform from 2016 despite there being at least one viable candidate willing to run against him). Again, the various committees made sure only Joe and Don were in the public consciousness and spread fear of diluting the vote.

But somebody learned something from 2016. The Biden campaign didn’t lockstep to the “Trump bad” script the way they had in the Clinton campaign. They actually talked issues this time. While Trump’s debate prep had more to do with Biden’s stutter than it did the issues facing the country, Biden talked about the pandemic, climate change, immigration…

And the same dynamics were not in play in 2020. Trump was no longer the upstart outsider. Trump dropped any effort to appear as the champion of the “everyman,” which made his links to the extreme right all the more prevalent. And he did nothing to counter the assumption that he was, in fact, representing that extreme and that extreme alone.

Biden’s handlers played it right. He’s come across as a gentleman – and a gentle man, a man of faith, a man who has known pain and loss and is empathetic with those who have also suffered. Who is known for reaching across the aisle, of being true friends with political opponents.

I suspect Trump wouldn’t be handled. His combativeness was unabated and I swear the man must have athlete’s tongue, since his foot was in his mouth more than it wasn’t. That combativeness helped get him elected in 2016 and I think it proved a detriment in 2020. I’ve always felt that Donald Trump is the least articulate President in our history, a man who puts too much value in personal aggression… A bully…

And yet, it was a squeaker. The contention that Trump lost because of personality issues has some validity, but it was more than that.

It was the stink factor. Personality does play a role here, but so do the issues.

We knew how important this election was. We knew we had to get out and vote. So we each examined our priorities, looked at both candidates, and decided.

We decided which candidate stunk least.

Neither candidate escapes the stink test. Each brings with them baggage of old sweat socks and last week’s tuna sandwiches. We looked at that, decided which stink was more acceptable, held our noses, and voted.

A great many of the votes – a very high percentage, I’d bet – were cast with one hand firmly squeezing nostrils closed, because that candidate’s stink was fractionally more tolerable. Biden’s stink won.

The Trump Administration had major problems, too many, in fact, to list here, and a continuation of those problems would have done more harm to this country. The erosion of our standing in the world accelerated in the past 4 years; we’ve become closer to a third-world country than the world power we have been, thanks in no small part to this administration’s policies that alienated many of our friends and empowered many of our enemies. The Biden Administration promises a different set of issues, not the least of which will be a diminution of our Constitutional rights, higher taxes and consumer prices, and a social system based on the European model, completely ignoring the fact we aren’t Europe.

It stinks. No matter how you slice it, it stinks.