We've been saying this for a couple of days now, but we'll re-up it for those still panicking: Biden has won this. Whether you want to call NV, AZ, GA or PA for him, almost any combination works, and he's got the votes there.

It's not a tight race: they're just counting votes. What's left is the mail-in ballots, which already swing blue (even when they come from red districts in some cases), and most of the outstanding ones are from deep, deep blue places now.

Philadelphia is not going to suddenly come over all Republican.

Most of NV's votes that are left are from Vegas, Georgia's are Atlanta. AZ (despite being already called by the AP and Fox) is the one most likely to wind up going to Trump after all.

Believe us, everyone in DC knows this too. The secret service have been sent out to guard Biden, politicking is going on behind the scenes, it's all a formality now. Trump has no way back.

As we said last night, he probably won't ever concede. It's just not psychologically possible for him, so expect him to complain and try to fire up his dwindling base until the bitter end. But it will be his end, have no doubt about it.

Our morbid curiosity has led to us becoming unusually well-informed this election, and we appreciate that if you're not examining the data quite minutely, it looks grimmer than it is. But it's been clear for a couple of days now how this was going to go.

The postal vote is very, very Democratic. Like, you can almost see why Trump's lot are saying it looks suspicious. But he told his voters to show up in person, so obviously there's a big divide in voting method.

Trump's strategy was this: he knew it would *probably* go against him. So he's spent the last 6 months casting doubt on the validity of postal voting, sowing the seeds for a disputed result, then he told Republicans to show up at the polls in person for exactly that reason.

What he hoped would happen was that this would give him a big enough lead on election night that, when the counting for the postal votes started (which Republicans purposefully delayed where they could), it would be easy to dismiss these "changes" as fraud.

That's exactly the narrative he's stuck to, except it doesn't work, because he *didn't* have that lead on the night. He was actually still behind.

And it's all a moot point because there isn't massive electoral fraud going on. It's just...counting. And it takes time to do that, precisely because of Republican obstructionism!

Trump is 100% aware that he's lost. He simply lacks the capacity to admit it.

The tricky thing now is predicting what happens in the aftermath of his defeat. There were threats of civil war, and there have been protests and attacks already. Will half of America rise up in fury at the alleged rigging of the vote?

Probably not. Because, again as we said yesterday, Trump won as many votes as he did not because his actual base is so numerous but because he's the incumbent running on the Republican party ticket.

That's not to say there are millions of Republicans who hate Trump and swallowed their objections to vote red no matter what. It's more like, there are millions of people who...just aren't that engaged with all this shit.

Who vote Republican on principle, or vote Trump because they buy into some vague shit about Democrats being socialists. Or are just, you know, generally conservative-leaning. Not every one of the 70-million-odd people who voted for him are red-cap wearing cultists.

We're not letting all those people off the hook, btw - there's no excuse for not knowing what Trump is by now. But there's a vast gulf between the average Republican voter who just wants to get on with their life and a genuine, QAnon fanatic.

And even within that last group, there's a difference between someone who believes it, who even talks about it in public, and someone who is willing to take up arms to fight for it.

Twitter and Reddit are swarming with MAGA conspiracists who talk a big game but are probably not going to pick up an assault rifle and storm the White House when Biden moves in.

Now, it only takes one fanatic with a gun to do a great deal of harm to a great number of people (that whole mess you have going on is a different discussion...), but a mass uprising to keep Trump in power is nothing more than a fantasy.

It's an ugly fantasy. It's a harmful fantasy. It's a fantasy we need to find a way to divert people from. But it *is* a fantasy. They do not have the numbers. Not of true believers. We've seen that time and time again.

Their protests fizzle out. Their movements lack conviction. They buckle under the slightest hint of resistance. They are cowards.

Also, circling back slightly, the proper fanatics are now turning on their former allies on the not-quite-so-gone-Right. Fox are already being called traitors. As allies desert Trump, the base's list of grievances grows longer.

The base is no longer being buoyed up by the (relative) moderates. Again, these are absolutely dangerous people - it only takes one gun to cause carnage - but they aren't *numerous*.

Let's summarise: the result of this election is not, and has never been, in doubt (since election day anyway). Your uncertainty is caused by a perceptual fallacy, exacerbated as a *deliberate Republican strategy* to give them a means to contest postal votes.

Don't let them tell you 2020 was a close run thing. Don't give them the ammunition to suggest it only would have taken a few tweaks in circumstances to swing it Trump's way. He lost, and he's lost decisively.

This is why we've been so frustrated by the disappointment over the Dem's performance, the premature postmortems, the "what the Democrats should have done" hand-wringing when it's actually all gone exactly to plan.

(People will now reply to this with objections about the Senate or whatever. Please assume we know what the situation is and have accounted for it in what we just said.)