Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ win in the 2020 presidential election was not a close victory. Biden has over 75,585,000 votes and counting while he is projected to have won 306 electoral votes when Georgia and Arizona are inevitably added to his totals. He has a mandate to lead America for the next four years that is questioned only by conspiracy-minded crackpots (like Donald Trump).
Biden’s win also means that conservatives have been “owned” by liberals.
“Owning” has been embraced for years by the right as a rhetorical technique to assert dominance over their enemies on the left. “Owning the libs” motivates much, if not all, of the right and it has attempted to do so while standing on shaky ground.
The theory is that liberal ideas are outliers, freak shows in a mostly center-right nation. In the eyes of the right, no progressive positions are truly popular and they delight in proving this assertion through conservative politics, media, and culture.
It has never been true. Donald Trump’s presidency began after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. He never had the mandate he purported to have. Clinton and her platform were supported by more American people in the election of 2016. The same was true 16 years before, when more voters picked Al Gore and his ideas over George W. Bush. The right’s claim to “owning” the right has always been rooted in the pro-slavery electoral college — the original “owning.”
The results of the 2020 election show that once again in a head-to-head battle, liberalism is more popular than conservatism. Voters ratified Biden’s presidential platform, which explicitly called for raising taxes on the wealthy, expanding health care coverage, and the inherent right of women to have autonomy over their own bodies. Conservative values were rejected and America — for the seventh time in the last eight national elections — embraced liberal ideas.
But even based on their own standards, liberals owned the right. Biden earned enough support in a wide swath of America to earn a victory in the electoral college. Biden won states in the west, in the east, in the heartland, and in the deep south.
Biden and Harris “owned” Trump all over America, and through him, liberals have shown the right where they stand in the national pecking order.
Faced with this undeniable fact, conservatives who spent the Trump years (and the Bush years before that) crowing about their phony dominance have now decided to act like hapless victims, subjected to torment from the left. If anything, liberals have been far too accommodating to right-wing views held by a minority of the populace. In fact, liberal ideas like Social Security and Medicare are so popular that time and again conservative politicians have pretended to hold them in the waning days of failing campaigns.
It’s far past time to stop being nice about all of this. To quote conservatives after the 2016 election, “you lost, get over it.”
Consider yourselves owned.
One of the first political bloggers in the world, Oliver Willis has operated OliverWillis.com since 2000. Contributor at Media Matters for America and The American Independent. Follow on Twitter at @owillis. Full bio.