Monday, February 15, 2021

The Republicans almost won everything

I explained that the 2020 election count was closer that most people admit, but it was even closer than I admitted.

The Democrats won the White House, Senate, and House. The Republicans could have taken all three, with only 90,000 more votes on election day.

The Wash. Post reports:

Biden won the three decisive states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — by 0.6 percentage points or less, which was similar to Trump’s 2016 victory. If you flip fewer than 43,000 votes across those three states, the electoral college is tied 269 to 269. In that case, Trump would probably have won, given that the race would be decided by one vote for each House delegation, of which Republicans control more. ...

The number of votes to flip the result was similar in the House. As the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman noted in light of Tenney’s win, fewer than 32,000 votes could have flipped the five seats that Republicans would have needed to win the House majority — Illinois’s 17th District, Iowa’s 3rd, New Jersey’s 7th, Texas’s 15th and Virginia’s 7th. ...

On Election Day, he [David Perdue (R-Ga.)] took 49.7 percent of the vote — fewer than 14,000 votes from winning the race outright. That would have foreclosed any chance Democrats had at winning the Senate.

So, 43,000 votes for president, 32,000 votes for the House and 14,000 votes for the Senate.

Thus the Republicans almost won everything, even tho the Democrats controlled the press, social media, universities, Deep State, super-rich, Hollywood, and all the other levers of power.

Considering how much power hinged on how few votes, this may have been the closest election in American political history. And in terms of the large number of election procedures that got changed, it may have also been the most crooked.

According to polls, the impeachment attempt and trial did nothing to convince anyone that the election was legitimate. Even tho the main Democrat claim was that Trump falsely argued that the election was stolen, a majority of Republicans still agree that it was stolen. Indeed, the Democrats did not really present any evidence to rebut what Trump said.

(I say "impeachment attempt", because the House did not deliver impeachment papers while Trump was President, so many scholars say that the process was unconstitutional.)

3 comments:

MikeAdamson said...

Very close indeed. The result highlights how important institutional measures such as the Electoral College, gerrymandering and vote suppression are to any possibility of Republican victory. No wonder conservatives generally have been deemphasizing democratic values...they can't win otherwise.

Roger said...

Put another way, the Democrats depend on ballot harvesting, early voting, mail-in voting, other vote coercion, running up excess votes in the big cities, controlling the media, and immigration, or they cannot win.

MikeAdamson said...

LOL. If the Republicans can't win a fair vote then they work to ensure an unfair one. Rather than attracting support they are suppressing opposition. It's worked for a while and will probably work again but it's not a long term solution. Eventually they will have to adapt or wither away. In my opinion of course.