Just as he promised he would, Donald Trump has refused to concede the U.S. presidential election to Joseph Biden. However, on Nov. 23, Emily Murphy, the Trump-appointed head of the General Services Administration, or GSA, finally allowed the Biden transition team to begin preparations for Biden’s assumption of the U.S. presidency on Jan. 20, 2021.
Between Nov. 3 and 23, Murphy had stubbornly refused to grant access to the Biden transition team on grounds that, in Ms. Murphy’s judgment, it wasn’t clear that Biden had won the election. Her decision to begin cooperating with Biden’s transition team was seen as a de facto admission by at least some in the Trump administration that Biden had won the election.
Widespread relief was felt in financial circles that a contested election outcome leading to widespread unrest in the streets, if not outright civil war, had been adverted. The stock market celebrated by rising to new all-time highs and the U.S. dollar rose against gold. However, Trump himself along with many if not most Republican politicians still refused to concede the election. Trump continued to claim that he had in fact won and that Biden and the Democrats had stolen the election through massive fraud.
In a normal U.S. presidential election, the losing candidate concedes the election and congratulates the winner within hours after the polls close on election day. If the election leads to a new president, the outgoing and incoming presidents and their aides work closely with one another until the transition is officially completed. Since the 1896 presidential election, when the losing “silver” Democrat William Jennings Bryan conceded to the victorious “gold” Republican William McKinley, the concession statement from the losing candidate has become an unwritten part of the U.S. Constitution.
This election year had unusual complications because of COVID-19, which made voting at traditional polling stations extremely dangerous. As a result, many voters voted by mail. This had the paradoxical effect of making voting easier for many voters. Perhaps of even greater importance, the racist and bigoted reelection campaign of far-right incumbent Donald Trump led to an extreme polarization of the U.S. electorate. Usually, the differences between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are obviously not very deep, if not virtually nonexistent. As a result, most voters, though they generally prefer one candidate to another, do not care that much whether their preferred candidate wins or loses.
But not this time. While Joseph Biden created even less excitement than the usual Democratic candidate, Donald Trump in contrast was either hated — the clear majority view in the U.S. and even more so in the world — or loved by his bigoted white racist supporters. The result was the largest turnout of voters for a U.S. presidential election in decades. As a consequence, the large number of mail-in ballots, combined with COVID-19, messed up the computer algorithms that since 1952 have enabled the networks to accurately call the election with only a minority of the votes counted.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 