In 2016 It Was the NRA. In 2020 It Was the NBA.
By: D J B
Tags: NBA, Politica, Election 2020, Trump, Voting

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This will be my last post about the election. I am doing this because some of my colleagues have been working feverishly to find ways to hold on to the idea that Trump can never lose. One of them has offered a slightly slanted statistical analysis in which he claims that Biden’s chances of winning were so minuscule that he could not have won without illegal help.

I am not going to question the statistics, although some of them are phrased in a way that really distorts the result. But I will explain why some of his statistics are correct, but his implied conclusion is wrong.

Some of the vote totals that surprised him were that in some big cities, such as NY and LA. Trump received more votes in 2020, but in the big cities in swing states, he lost, big time. Does that cause some suspicion?

Not if you think about how election campaigns are run and how money is spent. That’s where the NBA comes into it. Here a few of the people who helped Biden win the election. I’m sure you have heard of one of them: Jalen Brown, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and LeBron James.

If you are a fan of basketball, as I always have been, that’s what happens when you grow up in Brooklyn and move to Boston, you would have been watching the NBA play in the bubble in Orlando. They successfully kept COVID away and completed a very strange but interesting season.

They decided to play only after the league agreed that they could openly support Black Lives Matter. The players had words sown on their jerseys, such as” Freedom,” “Education,” and “Equality.” to show their support. Also, after there was another incident of the police shooting a Black man in the back, the players, led by Antetokounmpo, suspended play. They negotiated with the teams and the league that they would do more than just talk about the problem of systematic racism, they would work to confront it.

The league and the teams put up millions of dollars. The players did also. They did more. They arranged for the empty areas to be used as voting sites because they were big and people could vote safely, free of the virus. They arranged for poll workers and poll watchers. They also ran registration drives, and get out the vote drives. It impressed many members in the Black communities when a 6’9” well-known athlete came knocking on doors, explaining the importance of getting registered and voting.

Where did these registration drives take place? In Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Miami, Cleveland, and Phoenix. Why? Because they were swing states. Why spend time, effort, and money getting out the vote in NY or LA, where even if Trump did better, he wasn’t going to win the state.

They didn’t win in Florida or Ohio, but they did win in the states where Trump did the most damage to himself. They won in the states in which there was significant evidence of police brutality in the Black communities. Trump lost because he always backed the police, including the bad ones, and he went further and backed the Proud Boys and other White Supremacist attitudes.

Many of the people who voted in those cities were new voters. They were kids who had never voted before, and people who had felt disenfranchised or discouraged. Getting rid of the racist Trump was the rallying cry.

It was all done openly and legally. The votes were counted and recounted. In some states, the people who supervised and verified the totals were staunch Republicans. They stayed with the truth despite being vilified by Trump and his followers. Many had their lives and their families threatened.

The votes are real. The totals are real. The election was secure, supervised, and protected more than any other election in history. Chris Krebs, Trump’s man who was assigned to make sure of those things was very proud that the election went so well. Trump immediately fired him. Can’t have someone telling the Truth. Bill Barr may be fired next.

I didn’t mention Stacey Abrams. She lost the election in Georgia to the guy who was in charge of running the election. Before the voting in that election he removed thousands of people from the voting rolls, mostly in certain selected counties, and many by mistake. But, Ms. Abrams did something about that. She too did it openly and legally. People got registered. People voted. The votes were counted, openly, fairly.

The election is over. Biden won. There is no verifiable proof that indicates anything different. It is a disgrace that Trump rattles on about how he was cheated, especially since he did more to cheat than anyone — see post office delays. It’s a disgrace that so many people still try to find ways to believe him.

Also, 300,000 people have died from the virus. Trump was running to rallies instead of arranging for testing, recommending safety measures, or pushing for an economic stimulus. He is still doing nothing but trying to raise money to pay his legal bills. We will all suffer for another five weeks.

I hope that after January 20th, everyone will care about what is best for America again.