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Why, if one is a would-be authoritarian who envies the powers and prerogatives of strongmen around the globe, its positively subversive. No wonder, then, that the commander in chief has been tweeting Stop the Count. After all, hadnt he already come out, in the wee hours of Wednesday, and declared that he had won the election?

And yet the counting just keeps going on (and on and on), and the vote totals just keep changing as ballots are tallied. By Thursday, a grim reality was settling in, even in Trump World: Joe Biden is edging ever closer to the presidency. Add the states called for him and those where hes ahead, and he gets to 270 electoral votes. Further, theres a very real prospect that as the counting continues, he could accrue Pennsylvanias 20 Electoral College votes as well. And perhaps Georgias 16, too.

Thus the president has resorted to his favorite tools: False claims and legal challenges.

If you count the legal votes, I easily win the election. If you count the illegal and late votes, they can steal the election from us! the president said via a statement on Thursday.

Alas for the president if not the country, if the current map holds, stopping the vote counting wouldnt give him a victory. Not unless he holds on to Pennsylvania and manages to flip Arizona, the last of which could only happen by, ahem, continuing the vote counting. So Biden seems very likely to win the presidency some three decades after he first sought the office.

This wouldnt be the landslide Democrats had hoped for, obviously. But it will have the backstop that Trumps 2016 victory did not: The popular vote, which Biden is winning by 2.5 percentage points, concurs with the coming Electoral College verdict. That will lend the Biden presidency a broader legitimacy than Trump himself ever enjoyed.

As weve watched this ultra-close race, one conclusion is inescapable: Boring and ideologically unsatisfactory as the lefties find the 77-year-old Biden, the former vice president, with his regular-Joe persona and credibility with blue-collar voters, is probably the only one of the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates who could have given Democrats this narrow victory.

So, whom should Democrats thank?

Barack Obama? He was a crucial validator who gave several powerful and witty critiques of Trump, but no.

Cindy McCain? She was a cogent endorser of Biden, and that no doubt helped in Arizona, the state her husband, John McCain, long served in the Senate. But no.

Rather, Jim Clyburn, the hugely influential congressman from South Carolina.

When Biden was sagging after a fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and a fifth place in the New Hampshire primary, followed by a distant second in the Nevada caucuses, Clyburn calmly appraised the field and gave his crucial public backing to Biden.

His judgment spoke to the imperative a Black statesman brought to this presidential election: Biden was the Democrat with the best chance of winning.

Where Clyburn led, the South Carolina Democratic primary electorate followed. Bidens South Carolina victory restored him to front-runner status and put him on a trajectory to win the Democratic nomination.

Theres a lesson there and in this election as well. The early Democratic primary electorate tends to fall in love with the lefties, particularly when they come from neighboring states.

But those are not the kinds of candidates who appeal to middle America. In context of the closeness of this election in key Electoral College states, imagine if the Democratic nominee had been Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Their support of single-payer health care would have let Trump accurately charge that the Democrats favored eliminating everyones employer-sponsored health-care plans.

Will that lesson be learned?

Unlikely. Not by the lefties, anyway.

But Democrats whose top priority was beating Trump owe Jim Clyburn a heartfelt thank you.

Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.

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A president suffers the indignities of democracy - The Boston Globe