It was very possible, as evidenced in large part by the fact that it happened
Since Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, there’s been a lot of analysis aimed at somehow proving that his victory was a result of fraud or illegal voting. None of that analysis has offered credible proof of fraud, as dozens of judges in various courts and any number of independent observers have determined. But the goal is often less to prove the case than to suggest the case, to continue to present the well-settled issue as unsettled and thereby to present President Trump as having not yet lost his reelection bid instead of having clearly lost it a month ago.
In service of this objective, Trump’s supporters and the president himself have taken to declaring that Biden’s win was not just unlikely but “statistically impossible,” a term they generally use to mean something like “not possible — to the extreme.” But Biden’s win was possible, as made clear both through a detailed consideration of the claims of statistical impossibility and, more directly, by Biden’s having won the 2020 presidential contest.
Before we parse the claims of impossibility that have been floating out there, it’s worth pointing out that the term “statistically impossible” doesn’t really mean much. If something’s impossible, it’s impossible, and Biden winning the 2020 election was never impossible in any legitimate sense of the word. What people generally mean is that something is very, very unlikely, implying a sort of finality by using “statistically impossible” even when things have nothing to do with statistics. Continue reading.