It's odd that the President would out-perform his 2016 numbers and then be beaten by Joe Biden even though the President doubled his cut of the black vote, on which the Democratic Party often relies. It's even stranger, though, that Joe Biden's titanic landslide didn't come with coat-tails: the Republican Party kept the Senate, and added to the House.
One explanation for why that might happen is if Republican voters turned on Trump, but otherwise continued to vote for Republicans down ballot. If that were true, you'd expect to see lots of races with Republican Senate numbers well in advance of the President's numbers. But the results don't show that.
What the results appear to show is that Trump and the Republican Senators running alongside him mostly posted similar numbers, as you'd expect if Trump voters were also likely to be Republican voters down-ballot. Biden's numbers are the ones that look weird. In swing states Biden votes are not tethered to the Senate numbers.
MichiganSo one possibility is that somebody's inventing Biden votes on a tight schedule. In Georgia, they knew after Tuesday night counting got halted that they needed around 100,000 votes. Since each one takes time to process, time is limited, and you can't expand your personnel much without running risks of being discovered, they're turning out the Biden votes without bothering to fill out the rest of the ballot.
Trump: 2,637,173
GOP Sen: 2,630,042
Dif: 7,131
Biden: 2,787,544
Dem Sen: 2,718,451
Dif: 69,093
Georgia
Trump: 2,432,799
GOP Sen: 2,433,617
Dif: 818
Biden: 2,414,651
Dem Sen: 2,318,850
Dif: 95,801
12 comments:
What everyone missed is that in 2018 if you were pissed at Trump, uncomfortable with Trump, disliked Trump, were concerned about what Trump was doing and you wanted to cast a protest vote against Trump you could only do so by voting for Democrats and against Republicans. And that’s what caused the 2018 blue wave for the Democrats in the House races. And it’s why it didn’t reappear this time.
It didn’t reappear this time because Trump was on the ballot. So if you are pissed at Trump, uncomfortable with Trump, dislike Trump, are concerned about what Trump is doing and wanted to cast a protest vote against Trump you actually could directly vote against Trump and then go and vote how you normally would, how you’re comfortable voting, which was for all the other Republicans just like you always do because you’re a Republican.
"Biden-only" votes are possible, yes, if people are in a hurry. You need fewer people in on the deal, as well, if you are taking less time per ballot. While that strategy does create a suspicion, it also reduces it. If you screw more people out of their legitimately-earned seats, then there are more people who want investigations, and those people have friends in the state and even the small polling places to assist them in looking for irregularities. A Biden-only ballot might look bad, but it's entirely legal and you can't take it to court as evidence. While national Democrats might care some about a House or especially a Senate seat, they might be laser-focused on the Presidency. This would be especially true if they weren't so much concerned with policy as with graft or with avoiding investigations. So unless a down-ticket Democrat really needed those votes, it's better to keep them out of the equation altogether.
I think Republicans being in on it is unlikely, because conspiracies have to remain small, and they would be unreliable co-conspirators. The ideal is to have a few people who are looking for serious Chinese or Ukrainian money paying a very few people who have proved reliable over the years to insert some ballots. I'm not saying that happened, only that it would be the less-risky way to manage it.
Anonymous:
That's the scenario I considered here:
"One explanation for why that might happen is if Republican voters turned on Trump, but otherwise continued to vote for Republicans down ballot. If that were true, you'd expect to see lots of races with Republican Senate numbers well in advance of the President's numbers. But the results don't show that. What the results appear to show is that Trump and the Republican Senators running alongside him mostly posted similar numbers, as you'd expect if Trump voters were also likely to be Republican voters down-ballot."
So that's not what's causing this phenomenon. If we had numbers for Trump and R Senators that were the reverse of the Biden numbers -- say, 95,000 fewer votes for Trump than for the R Senator, coupled with 95,000 more votes for Biden than the D Senator -- then that would be a highly plausible account of the phenomenon.
AVI:
I have no evidence other than circumstantial to support that conjecture. Republican Congressional leadership is mostly very quiet during all this; and Mitch and Joe know each other very well from their mutual decades of Congressional membership; and Mitch's wife has strong blood ties to major PRC families and shipping firms; and Biden's family ties to China are becoming clearer all the time; and it does seem like a plausible explanation of the facts.
If there's a gentleman's agreement to cheat the Presidency but not the Congress, well, that troublesome Trump and all those Barr investigations into profitable family ties go away. It's not just those two either; Pelosi and Romney both also had sons with our favorite Ukrainian gas company.
That said, it's pure conjecture; perhaps it's even irresponsible to float the theory, given that it's essentially an accusation of treason made without proof. That's just the sort of thing that's been done toward Trump for four years, of course, but that doesn't make it right. So I want to be clear that it's merely a conjecture about a possibility that is not in any way proven; just something I'd be inclined to check, if there were a way to check it.
So far, though, it's not only the Congressional leadership that's not in evidence -- we haven't heard anything much from AG Barr. I heard a Postmaster actually checked on a Project Veritas video, but our official systems for ensuring the laws are obeyed are not much in evidence otherwise.
You taking my job of conspirac ist from me, grim. Which is fine.
So, I definitely want to be fair -- but at the same time, this really does look like glaring fraud. You could hardly come up with a more fraud-looking-like scenario than some masked dudes in vans and a Ferrari showing up at 4 AM to drop off a hundred thousand unanimous ballots. Maybe if they were wearing leather jackets, gold chains, and dark glasses.
But it might not be fraud. There were two models for how this could happen: the blue shift model, which newspapers advocated would be what the election looked like, and the blue fraud model. On the blue shift model (also called red mirage), we should expect Trump to run up majorities on election night, but then see them eroded or erased as mail in votes were counted. On the blue fraud model, the election night vote would give fraudsters in blue urban machines the precise targets they needed to hit.
There are several indicators, including this Senate mismatch, that the blue fraud model was more predictive. These large unanswered vote tranches, especially if delivered by night or 'discovered' without a clear chain of custody, look like they fit the fraud model.
That being the case, we need a very careful audit of all this stuff. Maybe much of it can be explained; maybe none of it makes any difference. But the fraud model looks like the better predictor of observations, and that suggests to me that we should take it seriously even though we can't yet prove it.
I get that you don't like Kemp but I'm at loss to figure out how different machines would have prevented the kind of fraud we might be seeing. These likely wouldn't be fraudulently created ballots. These would be real ballots that people mark with votes for Biden and then inject into the system. How is a machine supposed to figure out the difference between a ballot filled out by a legal voter and a ballot filled out by a corrupt election official? In some ways the mechanical vote counters might be more susceptible to manipulation than scanned paper ballots but the mechanical machines will at least leave evidence of tampering. Once paper ballots are captured by the tabulator you can't tell the source, and short of doing a revote if you find more votes than voters in a given area, how do you figure out which ones to reject?
In the end, this comes down to the people running the voting system, not the voting system being used.
Nobody in the news media is reporting how to break out the race and gender identities of the surprising, late-discovered, votes. Like Trump gained Black support in early voting, and gained Black support on election day, but (*crickets*) on the illegal mail ballots?
Almost like there aren't identifiable persons behind the blue wave ballots.
It is a strange lack of curiosity. Who are these masked men? Whatever, we're just grateful they showed up in the nick of time.
There is an explanation for this close election that fits the strangeness of the 5% or so increase in old men voting for Biden and lack of down-ticket senatorial votes. With many states mailing out ballots to everyone on their voter rolls, a lot of very old and demented citizens got them. Ordinarily they would not have been voting, because they cannot talk well enough to be walked through the polls by caregivers or coached through a telephone request for an official absentee ballet — and of course they cannot remember that there is an election coming up. But now, having automatically gotten a ballot just because many years ago they registered to vote, here it is, they are still alive, and a young adult caregiver is there to make sure Biden gets another vote.
The result is a drop in old men voting for Bush, and no votes for senators ( filling out the entire ballot is too much like work, and how many young adults care about the senate, anyway?)
The hell of this is, you cannot prove fraud. In fact, it is probably still legal even if the caregiver is way too young to vote. Very old, demented people often have a few “good” days when there is at least the illusion of talking to them a little, and the person who filled out the ballot can always claim it was done on one of those days. Unless you require that people who vote pass a Doctor’s test showing that they are not mentally impaired — the one that (among other things) asks who the president is — this problem will not go away. The Democrats are not about to give up this motherlode of unethical votes once they realize its value.
Do I need to point out how appropriate it is that Biden may have been elected by a nationwide and newly “enfranchised” block of people with senile dementia?
I neglected to include the source for my comment, a complete copy/paste: Commenter S. Townsend @ The New Neo. (Random Thoughts About the Election.)
Yes, the unknowable 80+ vote is impossible to measure and ripe for abuse. Of course most people would not do such a thing. But the few who would are also likely to do it with as many seniors as possible.
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