As of this writing — ten days after the 2020 election — we still have no idea who won the presidential race. We still may not know by the time you read this. Indeed, historians may never know who won.

The elections were condemned to chaos from their outset, born in an Original Sin, as Democrats raced to manipulate the coronavirus pandemic to justify conducting a nationwide massive mail-in vote that would risk overwhelming any and all tabulating systems theretofore in place. We had conducted some mail balloting over the years — for the military, the ill and confined, and others who would request a mail ballot. But the plot that unfolded in early and mid-2020 to pump tens of millions of unsolicited mail ballots into the stream of voting ensured chaos.

Everything about the elections seemed wrong, as if emanating from an alternate universe. One of the two main candidates would not come out of basement hiding, rarely campaigning in public. He generated no excitement and left his advocates always gasping forbreath and clawing their fingernails into any available surface, fearing what gaffe next might emanate. He had urged his voters on one occasion to vote for him on “Super Thursday,” two days after a major primary multi-state showdown. On another occasion, he begged his voters to cast their ballots for him, explaining that he needed them to secure the U.S. Senate seat he was pursuing. Famously, his gaffes came to define him.

By contrast, his opponent, the incumbent president of the United States, was as energetic as ever. The exciting Republican National Convention, marked by unprecedented Black and Hispanic engagement, had overwhelmed the dull and stodgy Democrat version where each night another host demonstrated the perils of using Zoom for inspiration. While the Democrat week ended with a low-budget display of a few fireworks in a parking lot that evoked an evening at Sonic for a burger and fries, the GOP convention concluded with a star-spangled fireworks display that seemed akin to what Francis Scott Key had witnessed in Baltimore during the War of 1812 on the night he wrote the lyrics that became our national anthem.

The president got waylaid briefly when infected with COVID-19 but soon was back on the campaign trail, more robust than ever. While the Left Media had sought to leverage a rally in Tulsa, half a year earlier, to suggest that the president had lost his ability to draw large crowds, the reality manifested day after day in October and November as huge assemblages in the tens of thousands thronged, buoyed by an energized Donald Trump. One might be excused for thinking that maybe, instead of starting each morning with a caffeine pick-me-up from a cup of Joe, perhaps it is better to begin daily with a cocktail of Dexamethasone, Zinc, Vitamin D, and whatever else the doctors had given President Trump during his COVID recovery. Inspired by thoughts paralleling Estelle Reiner’s cameo restaurant character in the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally, who could blame anyone watching Donald Trump on the campaign trail for saying, “I’ll have what he’s having”?

The professionals’ polls, though, kept telling Americans not to believe what they were seeing. As late as Election Eve, pollsters assured us that we were on the verge of a Biden blowout. Reuters had Biden winning the national vote by 7 points; Quinnipiac gave it to Biden by double digits at 11 and CNBC by 10. Biden would win Pennsylvania by 7 points (ABC News and also Monmouth), 6 points (Reuters and also the New York Times), or 5 points (NBC News/Marist). He would win Florida by 6 (Emerson), by 5 (Quinnipiac), or 4 (Reuters/Ipsos). Biden would take North Carolina by 2 (CNBC), Michigan by 7 points (also CNBC), and Wisconsin by 8 (CNBC again). The New York Times gave Biden Wisconsin by 11, while Reuters had him winning by 10. Quinnipiac had Biden taking Ohio by 4. Reuters had Biden winning Michigan by 10, with Emerson putting it at 7. In the end, all those states either were won outright by the president or mostly remained one-point squeakers.

The crack polling boded a Senate bloodbath as well for Republicans. Reuters and CNBC led other pollsters — all thirteen major polls, except for Trafalgar — who gave North Carolina’s alliterative showdown to Cal Cunningham over Thom Tillis. Emerson had Theresa Greenfield unseating Joni Ernst in Iowa by 4. Only days before voting, Greenfield’s smashing win likewise was predicted by CBS News, Monmouth, InsiderAdvantage, Quinnipiac, and the New York Times. Emerson had Sara Gideon beating Susan Collins by 6 in Maine. To their everlasting credit, though, most polls correctly predicted that the Democrats would win the Senate seat in Massachusetts, and the Republicans would hold the State House in Utah. In the end, Republican Joni Ernst won Iowa handily by 7, while Susan Collins won Maine by 9. Other races where polls saw incumbent Republican U.S. senators facing disaster and catastrophe ended with Lindsay Graham winning a laugher by 10 points in South Carolina, as did John Cornyn in Texas (also by 10), Steve Daines in Montana (likewise 10 points), and Mitch McConnell in Kentucky (by 20).

In the end, the Republicans secured at least fifty Senate seats and remained well positioned to nail down their majority when Georgia will vote in two runoff contests on January 5 pitting two established and experienced Republican U.S. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, against a radical socialist thirty-three-year-old fellow who has refined losing to an art form and an even more radical candidate whose claims to fame include praising the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “G-d-damn America” sermon and comparing Israel to Apartheid South Africa. Those latter two, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, seem destined for the Stacey Abrams Museum of the Georgia Wannabe Who Never Wuz.

And so it went down-ticket. Pollsters spoke of Democrats adding five to ten seats or more to their majority. Instead, as of this writing, Republicans have flipped at least eleven Democrat House seats, with several more flips only days away from confirmation, and Jeff Van Drew, who switched parties during the Pelosi–Schiff impeachment fiasco, held his once-Democrat seat firmly, but this time for the Republican column. As a result, the Democrat House majority now is shaved down from 235 to 199 to a tight advantage of barely some ten. All it will take is a flip of half a dozen more seats in 2022, and Nancy Pelosi will be able to spend more time having her hair blown without masking and eating $13 quarts of ice cream.

Of course the race to watch remains the presidential nail-biter. On Election Night President Trump led comfortably in the major battlegrounds. Suddenly, like a choreographed dance number, virtually all such states stopped counting. Soon, vote dumps swirled for Biden. In time, though Dead Men Tell No Tales, many of the once-living took a moment’s pause from the crypt to cast ballots for Uncle Joe. A voting-equipment company, Dominion Voting Systems, suddenly came under new scrutiny. Although they had donated to the Clinton Foundation and their machinery had been rejected for use in Texas, their software and hardware were dominant in North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania — comprising eighty-four electoral college votes in six of the tightest battleground states. Voters still remember from last year’s Democrat Iowa state caucuses the extent of chaotic electoral damage that defective tabulating software can wreak. Pennsylvania Democrat election officials meanwhile tried to count mail ballots arriving after the formally legislated state deadline, even late ballots bereft of postmarks, until Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered them to segregate those envelopes. Wisconsin recorded an unheard-of near-90 percent turnout of registered voters, with Milwaukee tallying an 84 percent turnout — just enough to tilt the state results last-minute for Biden by less than 1 percent — even though Cleveland, a nearby Midwestern metropolis with a similar demographic, tallied only a 51 percent voter turnout in a state with a Trump lead too wide to trample. Georgia, meanwhile, found itself engaged in a manual audit, recounting every ballot.

Racing to document voter fraud and election shenanigans with admissible evidence to gain judicial scrutiny, Republicans proceeded to obtain in a single week at least 234 sworn affidavits signed by witnesses to alleged fraud. When the Washington Post published a story that one key witness, a Pennsylvania postal worker, had recanted his assertions of election fraud in the Keystone State, that gentleman, Richard Hopkins, went on Twitter to deny instead the WaPo wistful account and to reassert the cheating he had seen. Other Republicans were denied the opportunity even to behold the cheating as state election officials in Democrat battlegrounds barred them from viewing the actual tabulating, instead relegating them to the cheap seats far away. And they did not even offer them binoculars. Although CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC insisted on crowning Joe Biden as their new leader, and even Fox News started calling him “president-elect,” the incumbent in theWhite House, true to the form he brought four years earlier as an outsider entering the Swamp, once again would not be intimidated and determinedly insisted — uncharacteristically for a Republican— on asserting his constitutional right to have the facts investigated and the courts adjudicate the mess. Certainly Al Gore had fought for more than a month, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, over chads in Florida. By contrast, cheated Republicans always had faded away meekly after being pick-pocketed: Richard Nixon in 1960, Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008 Minnesota, Sen. Ted Stevens in 2008 Alaska, Gov. Dino Rossi in 2004 Washington state, and so many others cheated out of their seats over the years.

Perhaps as you read this, you now know how the saga ends. More probably, unless five Supreme Court justices will have shown courage in facing down the Clinton–Obama picks named Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, it will remain a mystery that never will be resolved nor deciphered. Our best detectives are gone. Sherlock Holmes is ineligible because of White Male Privilege. Agatha Christie, albeit a woman, is deceased and therefore can offer little but another Democrat vote from beyond the grave. And Charlie Chan seems destined for assignment by Ocasio-Cortez and Robert Reich to mandatory reeducation in Critical Race Theory. Meanwhile, as of this writing, Donald Trump is president.