Thread by @shaunjlawson

I'm laughing at many of the responses to *that* thread. I did say I was a small and bitter man ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Predictably, many of the comments just repeat a bunch of myths. Which I'll run through now.

1. "Biden's only just scraped it!" Wrong.

The only reason they're still counting now is because so so many voted by mail. In normal circumstances - almost everyone voting in-person - we'd have known the result by Wednesday morning.

Biden's electoral college outcome is going to be 306-232. That is NOT 'only just scraping it'. Nor is the highest number of votes for any Presidential candidate in history (the previous record was in 2008); nor is a popular vote margin which will keep rising and hit 5m and above.

That's neither 'scraping it' nor a landslide. It's a comfortable victory. There's many many votes still to come in from California, New York and elsewhere which'll keep pushing the margin up.

2. "But the Democrats haven't won the Senate!" First, I bet many of those saying this don't realise how the Senate works, and how wildly unrepresentative it is. See the tweets here:

https://twitter.com/shaunjlawson/status/1324434648940892161

Second, we're heading for two special elections in Georgia on Jan 5.

That'll be 15 days before Biden is (we assume) sworn in, while Trump pursues a scorched earth strategy beyond belief, and with the pandemic likely to be causing absolutely unmitigated hell. This week alone, the US is recording record case numbers day after day.

So those two special elections will become, very simply:

"Do you want a functioning government able to do something about a pandemic which could otherwise kill millions?"

It's fairly obvious what the outcome of that will be - especially with Trump not interested.

Win those two seats, in a state where Democrats are more energised and better organised than arguably anywhere else in the country, and it's 50-50: with Kamala Harris as the casting vote.

3. The House. I agree: it's disappointing. Yet the Dems still comfortably control it.

In other words, they are two special election wins from controlling the Presidency, the Senate and the House. And people think that's some terrible outcome?!

4. Now, though, let's turn to Covid. On which the point is being missed spectacularly.

Here's a short Covid timeline.

- China discover it in December

- China lock down Wuhan in mid-January

- WHO declares it as Public Health Emergency on 30 January

- US does the same on 31 January

- Virus spreads across Asia and into Europe in February

- Massive stock market crash - unprecedented in how deep it is - in the week beginning... 24 February. During that week, I wrote a thread highlighting the enormous, ongoing impact that the pandemic would have.

https://twitter.com/shaunjlawson/status/1233196502522171393

The crash was the day the world changed. 5 days later, the South Carolina primary was held. The results of which were:

Biden 49%
Sanders 20%

*After* this rout, I was called an idiot for suggesting the same would happen on March 3: Super Tuesday. Yet it did, and then some.

On Super Tuesday, that voters were horribly concerned about the pandemic was pretty bloody obvious. So they chose a safe pair of hands - someone they could trust - and rejected something much more radical. Through massive turnout and massive margins all over the country.

I highlighted it as an important factor at the time.

All those calling me out for referring to tweets from the start of March appear to be saying that in a wildly unequal country with no affordable healthcare, they somehow couldn't foresee what Covid would do.

That is mad. It's incredible. But it was true of astonishing numbers of people.

Did you think a global pandemic would somehow magically disappear under the most incompetent President ever known? Did you think the biggest market crash since records began meant nothing?!

EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW ABOUT THE PANDEMIC.

Yet despite this, the same absolute nonsense was continually asserted. Despite Sanders now being obliterated in state after state after state: to a quite staggering extent in the very states people insisted would be his strength.

And as the pandemic spread, and Trump had no plan and remained in denial, as people slowly accepted that Sanders would not get the nomination, their viewpoint turned into:

"Biden's gonna get smashed! He has no chance!"

No chance? At a time of unparalleled economic disaster and a global health emergency under a leader who couldn't possibly be any less suited to it? Were you even living on the same planet?

I find this lack of vision utterly astonishing.

Exactly the same lack of vision insists:

- Starmer cannot possibly win back Red Wall voters (the polls suggest he's already doing so, significantly)

- Brexiteers will never vote for a Remainer. Despite Brexit leading to economic calamity and them losing their jobs and homes.

It also routinely ignores the economic catastrophe caused by Covid. Which apparently, people think will also just magically vanish.

And in September, BEFORE the chaos in the UK and while the government continued to bail the public out - before the shit hit the fan, in other words - amazingly, Starmer led Sunak as a 'capable leader' by 3 points.

I was astonished at that myself.

When (not if) he becomes Tory leader, Rishi's gonna have a frankly impossible task on his hands: which he's likely to respond to 100% wrongly, through even more cuts.

Anyone who thinks that somehow won't have an impact, a big one, is away with the fairies.

None of this is difficult. I'm not claiming to be some clairvoyant here. This is incredibly basic stuff.

The whole purpose of the thread was to ask people to view things through EVIDENCE. Not their political prisms. As things change, public opinion changes.

Yet there's people on this platform - well-meaning, all - who are like ostriches. Predicting that Biden would win wasn't hard. It was easy.

But when people keep insisting "Bernie would've won!" about someone who couldn't even break 25-30% among Democrats... just do the maths.